Not A Question Of If, But When A Ransomware Attack Will Occur

By Doug Morris and Thorston Thorpe

Introduction

There has been a significant increase in the number of ransomware attacks and payments by organizations in 2019.  Businesses of all types have been adversely affected by ransomware crippling productivity and consumer confidence. Technology leaders have now begun to plan for ransomware attacks, understanding that a paradigm shift from “If we get hit by ransomware” to “When we get hit by ransomware” is required.  The time to prepare for a ransomware attack is before it happens.  In addition to traditional security measures that must be adhered to, housing critical business data in multiple secure locations is also of paramount importance.

Ways Commvault can help

Mature IT organizations have started to assess their readiness for a ransomware event.  Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery software helps to minimize the risk of ransomware by leveraging a variety of technologies, including the use of:

Anomaly detectionHoneypots Replicating data to an air-gapped location Fast recovery through automationMinimizing costs through use of public cloud resources andEnvironment notifications to administrators

The ability to effectively recover data from a ransomware attack could be the difference in whether your organization pays the ransom and whether you are still employed.

Use cloud resources for cost-effective recovery

In the past, business continuance and disaster recovery processes, and procedures, were sometimes created and sometimes tested. The costs of testing were significant with a separate data center provisioned with floor space, power, cooling, compute and storage infrastructure. The likelihood of a disaster seemed remote, the amount of data loss could be up to 24 hours and one crossed their fingers that a disaster recovery would never need to be invoked.

All that has changed within the past few years. Creation of a separate data center isn’t necessary as organizations can take advantage of low-cost blob storage provided by several public cloud providers. Commvault creates a separate copy of backup data within blob storage in a space-efficient compressed and deduplicated fashion. Commvault is also able to encrypt the data in-transit and in-rest. Using Commvault’s and the public clouds automation capabilities:

Disaster recovery tests can be performed on a more frequent or random basisBe shorter in durationBe several orders of magnitude less expensive than the creation of a secondary data center

The likelihood of a disaster recovery declaration is still remote; however, the chance of a ransomware infection is much larger. It is not a question of if your organization will be hacked, but when it happen. The cleverness, ingenuity, adaptability and rapid development of new exploits by bad actors is overwhelming.

Conclusion

Ransomware can have an immediate and long-lasting negative impact to a company. If business is disrupted because of a ransomware attack, the revenue lost during that outage is unrecoverable. Many organizations that were not properly prepared end up paying the ransom to obtain a key to decrypt their data. Commvault software can mitigate the risks in a cost-effective, simple-to-implement solution.

You can also visit documentation.commvault.com for more information and contact a local Commvault Sales Engineer for a more detailed discussion.