7 Steps to Protect Your Business Data from Ransomware.

Among the latest growing security issues that organizations face today is ransomware. So one of the biggest forms of cybercrime. Each day, the story of criminals comes into the news feeds. Then It brazenly declares that they are holding serious data if the ransom is not paid. And there is a guarantee that the data will not be recovered even if you pay the ransom. Steps to Defend Your Enterprise of Ransomware Attacks

Ransomware is fast turning out to be a very profitable business operating in the hands of well-funded crime syndicates. what with having teams of full-time developers at their disposal. According to CyberSecurity Ventures [1], Ransomware Attacks hit a new victim every 5 seconds and, Steps to Defend Your Enterprise in 2021, So worldwide damage costs have exceeded $ 20 billion.

There are newer strains of ransomware as well as other kinds of malware threats. And, data is merely increasing from one end to the cloud. Then your business and customer data are at risk. In a fast-changing environment, businesses have to act swiftly to protect critical data.

New strains of ransomware and other malware are emerging regularly, putting your business and customer data at greater risk than ever, especially with increasing data at the edge of the cloud. Fast action is now required by businesses to protect their critical data in this evolving environment.

Data protection is an important line of defense against ransomware. Secure, recoverable backup images of critical business data and applications enable businesses to step back, recover applications, and recover data before the point of ransomware infection. So Many data protection solutions on the market promise to support both backup and restore; most offer only partial protection.

Can you protect against ransomware attacks?

Attacks are going to happen. As long as cybercriminals believe your data is worth their time and effort. Then they will continue to exploit weaknesses. and come up with novel creative ways to encrypt critical data. So That means investing in recovery is every bit as important as prevention. Having data protection as part of your cybersecurity framework amounts to cyber resilience.

Here are 7  practices.  the risk of ransomware attacks

1.  recovery and backup solutions for both disasters 

As a part of every cyber resilience plan, backup is done. So the Disaster scenario, like the case of ransomware, calls upon the organizations to include DR in this plan as well. Then the Modern disaster recovery solutions provide granular recovery checkpoints and allow for whole sites or applications to recover in just a few clicks. These solutions have enabled considerably lower RPO and faster RTO.

The 3-2-1-1 rule does not become any less relevant, and protection of multi-layered data continues to be necessary. Store three copies of your data. Then Two different types of media, the first is offsite and the second is offline. Organizations using recovery and backup solutions. To create multi-layered defense risk and run much faster after encryption. With HPE’s data protection solutions, you can easily adopt the 3-2-1-1 rule and safeguard the integrity of your data while maximizing the business application and data availability.

2. Test, test, and test to ensure recover

Most organizations do not know how capable they are of recovery, which is usually a result of low-frequency testing of their disaster recovery and backup solutions. Organizations must ensure that they show recovery capabilities by completely testing all operations ranging from failovers to file-level recoveries. Simulate real disaster and recovery scenarios so that administrators can perform according to protocols and documentation, especially in ransomware recovery simulations.

3. Separate back data

The three most prevalent malicious operations that cybercriminals attempt to cause organizations to pay a ransom for are to encrypt, alter, or delete their data. If the data is altered, the ransomware changes the storage blocks, and your backup system begins serving up the altered and now encrypted files. Immutable backups maintain the integrity of backed-up data, making it inaccessible; thus, creating a wall against ransomware attacks. Immutable and unencryptable, unmodifiable, undeletable, and Steps to Defend Your Enterprise, HPE StoreOnce Catalyst is one of these systems that offer immutable backups. Data protection solutions by HPE ensure complete isolation of data in place wherever it resides to prevent intentional or unintentional tampering. As a ‘secure by design’.

4. Improve Your RPOs

This can result in several hours or even one whole day of lost data with nightly/daily backups. If you want to minimize data loss, now is the time to revisit your frequency for data protection towards better RPOs. HPE Data Protection Solutions will empower you to afford RPOs of seconds with CDP besides your backup solutions, which are there to serve better towards a greater recovery time and longer storage period. The ability of near-continuous data protection enables more frequent backups.

5. Speed up your RTO

The attacks happen, and it’s fast. Therefore, the 3-2-1-1 rule should be in use in protecting oneself from data loss. Equally important is getting ready for quick recovery each time, because the longer an extended wait of the business is to get back to normal, the more damage.
Solutions that include orchestration and automation in data protection offer predictable, fast recovery and limit the subsequent system outage time, business disruption, or lost revenue. As an HPE company, Zerto makes your process of recovering data and applications at scale. Zerto’s CDP technology supports recovery in mere minutes, so your organization can recover from disruption or failure in real-time with industry-low RPOs and the fastest RTOs in the industry.

6. Introduce air-gapped data protection

The idea is simple: if you’ve got something that’s not plugged into the network, that can’t be attacked remotely. One of the challenges in on-premises data protection solutions is that they are exposed to the same threat of ransomware as the rest of your data center. The same ransomware can infect any backup environment that is connected to your network. This then goes on to destroy your main database, leaving you blinded at the right time when you need access to your backup data.

With tape backup solutions that are empty, you can keep yourself out of this cyber trap. Offline and offsite copies of data. that ransomware cannot disrupt a backup. Secondary backup copies to tape to make frequently.  that you always have a clean copy of your data.

7. On-demand sandboxes and anomaly detection

Recovery of data safely from ransomware attacks needs more than recovery in itself; it has to encompass checking and segregating the data for verification before reproducing. Various anomalies are monitored within a data center. some of which are a very good indication of active ransomware. This is where HPE InfoSight comes to life and gives you the granularity of information needed for business decisions. Systems hard by patching the latest patches to prevent ransomware attacks. Also important is looking for malware before an attack happens. And it takes a few days before attackers decide to activate the malware. Often, such attacks target known insecurities.

By creating an on-demand sandbox replica of your production environment in minutes, Zerto allows you to speed up the testing of security patches and malware scanning without disruption. Fast, uninterrupted testing of security patches and malware scanning in on-demand sandboxes help you speed up your preventive measures to safeguard your systems against the threat of ransomware. Sandboxes and anomaly detection will therefore complement each other to give you that extra layer of protection against cyber threats and modern disasters.

Get back in control

These steps help you begin to protect your organization’s data from damaging ransomware attacks. But then, when you have control over your business data and, letter you are not immune to hacker requests. This is the changing dangerous landscape. More businesses have to protect their data from any type of cyberattack. Their edge-to-cloud data protection needs modernization. Modernization of data protection gives control. The price of a recovery environment will only bring an advancement in performance if it brings reduced risk and complexity. A secure edge, on-premises, and in the cloud means you will be able to meet any future SLAs. You will be able to meet demand SLAs; that is to say RPO and RTO with your business moving forward.

RAM Antivirus

RAM Research Center