How are you “Ransomware-Proofing” your Backup Data?

Time and time again, we read about some costly ransomware attack on a well-known company. We read headline news stating that the number of ransomware strains targeting NAS and backup storage devices is growing. Sadly, the ones that hit the news are only the tip of the iceberg; many more successful attacks don’t ever make the news. But whether reported or not, a common theme found amongst most of these successful attacks is the fact that the backups themselves were compromised.

After spending nine years of my career working for a backup and recovery software vendor, I now make it a top priority to help businesses implement a reliable backup and data recovery (DR) plan. Regular testing of recovery for backed-up systems enables reliable recovery when you actually need it. However, I have found that businesses often relegate backups to storage solutions that are typically are  “something cheap,” and/or quickly available, even is the storage is near end-of-lie. They do so without much further thought on the functionality of that storage solution.

With backups, protecting the backup data itself against a ransomware-type attack is tantamount to either a) paying a ransom in Bitcoin or b) not paying a ransom.

It’s that simple.

To protect backup data against ransomware, it is essential to have configurable, automatic snapshot functionality available on the storage being used. Without snapshots on the storage, one should just assume in advance that in the event of a ransomware attack, the backups will be compromised, and you’ll be faced with the decision of paying a ransom to get your data back … well, hopefully, you’ll get your data back.

Read-only snapshots are an inherent part of the technology LucidLink brings to the table. LucidLink allows you to configure automatic snapshots on your cloud and/or on-premises storage at as many intervals of choice that is required in minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years. These snapshots generate no performance impact. Secondly, retention settings for these snapshots are fully configurable for each snapshot interval that is configured.

For further technical information, see our KB article on snapshots. 

With LucidLink—whether you are using on-premises object storage such as MinIO, Scality, Cloudian, Ceph, etc., and/or cloud object storage such as Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure Blob, IBM Cloud, Google Cloud, Wasabi, etc., for your backup storage. Rest assured that your backup data will be protected and not compromised in a ransomware-type attack.

See how you can ransom-proof your backup data, sign up for a 14-day free trial. Isn’t your data worth it?