One of the biggest challenges in the growing digital economy is the exponential rise in ransomware attacks. You can’t look at technology news without seeing yet another story about an organization that was ill-prepared and had been compromised.
When I sat down to write this post, I did some quick research and found that more than thirty different organizations had been attacked and had some sort of data loss in the previous week. Of course, these numbers are most likely artificially low and only reflect those attacks that were reported! No one wants to advertise that you have exploitable weaknesses in your IT infrastructure.
A Universal Truth: Ransomware Prevention Is a Growing Challenge
Even with all the clever technology solutions out there, it’s clear that attackers are having success. It’s a case of when, not if, your organization gets compromised. What will you do to recover your data from a ransomware attack?
You can go with the “pay and pray solution.” You pay the ransom and hope that the attackers will give your data back. Given there isn’t much honor amongst thieves, it is not surprising to learn that a substantial 45% of customers never get their data back after paying the ransom. Even if you pay up and get your data back, guess what? There’s a good chance they will be back, because you got attacked and you’re a good payer. So why not rinse and repeat?
The “get out of paying the ransom card” is your data backup application. This is where you need to go if you don’t want to pay the ransom.
Unfortunately, the ransomware attackers know this as well. Not content with compromising your production data, now they’re going after your backups in hopes of ruining your ability to recover. Thanks for nothing, ransomware attackers!
Why Disaster Recovery Isn’t Ransomware Recovery
Let’s take a quick look at the challenges in the data protection arena.
Data protection is one of the most complex areas of IT infrastructure. Data has to be quickly copied from multiple sources and quickly secured for restore in the event of corruption, human error, or disaster.
For a long time in the disaster recovery world, the emphasis was placed on some sort of natural event (such as a flood, earthquake, or tornado) or some human made disaster (a fire or, for example, a terrorist attack). Redundant copies, physical separation, tape shipping, replication, high-availability between sites, and so on are all strategies that organizations and DR consultants would deploy. All are extremely important. But does this strategy protect you against a ransomware attack? Not really. In fact, you could argue that it makes it worse! For instance, would I want to be copying compromised data?
A New Strategy for Ransomware Protection is Needed
Fortunately, the technology industry has turned its considerable brain power to solving this. You can see many IT vendors offering many different solutions. But as with all technology solutions, they are complex and lack interoperability. That means you have to rip-and-replace, which in the world of enterprise data protection (where there are often thousands of systems generating multiple petabytes of data) is complex, risky, and expensive. And that’s all before you even get to deploy the solution and realize any value.
So how about a state-of-the-art solution that’s easy to deploy? A solution that’s been thoroughly tested with all the leading data protection vendors so you don’t have to change your backup software? A solution that helps you mitigate against a ransomware attack by protecting your backup data and provides a super-fast restoration environment for ransomware data recovery?
Look no further than PureStorage® FlashBlade™! Don’t take my word for it. Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) recently did a lab validation of FlashBlade in conjunction with Commvault, Veeam, and Veritas NetBackup software. The lab validation shows how easy it is to configure FlashBlade to protect backup copies and how to recover using the aforementioned backup products.
