iTWire - Without backup your cybersecurity posture might not be as resilient as...

Thursday, 30 March 2023 20:49

Without backup your cybersecurity posture might not be as resilient as you think Featured

Garett Paton

GUEST OPINION: With data breaches rarely far from the headlines these days, the alarms for stronger data protection could not be ringing louder and they should not be ignored. In seeking the competitive advantages of capturing more data, along with a general data explosion, many organisations have not adequately understood the scale of the task of protecting it.

It’s understandable how we got here. For one thing, there is a lot of data, with predictions that the global data volume will reach 175 zettabytes by 2025. This scale of data has knock-on effects on data management as well as creating data silos and can create haphazard adoption of the cloud. Combine this with an unprecedented rise in cyberattacks, limited budgets, and constrained operational staff, and it’s a disaster waiting to happen.

Dell Technologies’ 2022 GDPI snapshot research highlighted that 59% of its Asia Pacific and Japan including China (APJC) respondents are not very confident that all business-critical data can be reliably recovered in the event of a destructive cyberattack. Moreover, 70% of APJC respondents are concerned their organisation’s existing data protection measures may not be sufficient to cope with malware and ransomware threats.

And according to Dell Technologies Breakthrough research, 76% of employees in Australia and New Zealand acknowledge that given the ever-evolving nature of work, their organisation would be even more exposed to cyberattacks in the year ahead.

Without the right strategy, this problem is only going to get more complex. It’s fantastic that World Backup Day on 31 March is a global recognition of the issue, but it’s equally important to understand that it’s also an ongoing one. Instead, you should be thinking about holding your personal Backup Week or Month – anything to keep it on your radar.

Backups serve several purposes. This includes restoring data if it gets lost or corrupted, retaining copies of data for a period of time for compliance reasons, enabling analytics projects that may need years’ worth of history, and new software projects that often require copies of production data for development and testing. If your data is not effectively backed up, it can’t be recovered and can severely impact business continuity.

From a cybersecurity perspective, backup practices in many organisations have not kept pace with the shift in how we work, with distributed data, hybrid work models, multicloud environments and as-a-Service sourcing changing the game. Just as you don’t want the first time you think about your building’s fire escape plan to be the day there’s an actual fire, you don’t want the first time you think about the role of your backup strategy in your business’ cyber resiliency to be the day you need to do a recovery.

So, if you wanted to do a fire drill on your backup to see how well it integrates with your cyber resilience strategy, you need to consider the following questions.

Do you know where your data is?

You can’t begin to assess how vulnerable a given dataset is if you don’t even know where it is. Conduct an audit of all your environments including databases, virtual machines, persistent Kubernetes data, edge locations, multicloud environments and as-a-Service data.

Do you have the right backup?

Depending on your circumstances, traditional backups, snapshots, replication, and deduplicated storage can speed up backup and/or recovery. The key is ensuring data integrity so that the data written to backup storage is recoverable as it is written. Often cyber threats attack your backup data as well, which makes the immutability of the backup data and the infrastructure it resides in increasingly important.

Are you giving your backup enough love?

Backup is not a set-and-forget proposition. It will get less secure if left unattended. The operating systems it runs on will need patching and there are new tools and guides to hardening the backup emerging all the time. A few options to consider include enabling encryption in flight and/or at rest or exploring the read-only options for backup data.

Who can get their hands on your backup?

There is a range of tools you can deploy to ensure only the right people have access, including Multi-factor Authentication, Transport Layer Security (TLS) certificates and API Credentials.

How would you know if something is wrong?

During a malware attack, it can be difficult to spot an anomaly or know what has been corrupted. Use policy reports, notifications and real-time capture leads to ensure the data written to backup stays in its original form and is of integrity, allowing for trusted recovery.

Could automation make life easier?

Explore the ways in which automation can reduce risk, enable scale, and deliver proof. For example, if you adopt recovery testing, a scheduled, automated service can help test the recoverability of critical devices without manual setup or local resources.

Is isolation the way forward?

If not sufficiently protected, organisations run the risk of corrupted, lost, or inaccessible backups. Creating a network-isolated backup such as a cyber vault means your data is safe from tampering. The removal of your backup from your management network not only lets you develop isolated immutable copies of your data but provides ‘at rest’ analytics.

Securing data, applications, and devices calls for a more mature approach that leverages innovative technologies for scale and intelligence and aligns around the business rather than the threats. It is critical that your business is proactive in recovery planning and defends the whole organisation rather than in parts.

Having the right backup strategy can help your organisation with business continuity, mitigation of data loss and maintaining a competitive edge in today's digital era. Use World Backup Day as your motivation to get started.

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