Report: Only Half of Ransomware-Compromised Data Will Be Recovered
"Ransomware attacks will happen — regardless of prevention technologies or employee awareness training," the report concluded. "Through the strategic alignment of IT and security teams and the implementation of robust security measures and technologies to ensure clean, secure, and recoverable backups, organizations will be better prepared to bounce forward from a ransomware attack by implementing the following best practices:
- Help IT teams and security teams work better together: One of the most revealing trends in this report is the fractured strategy, tool sets, and organizational alignment between executive leadership, the security teams responsible for prevention and detection, and the backup teams tasked with protection and recovery. In some organizations, especially those that handle large volumes of sensitive data, a cross-functional committee may oversee backup and disaster recovery planning. This committee typically includes representatives from IT, security, legal, and business units to ensure all perspectives are considered in the backup strategy.
- Plan ahead: The attack will be worse than you imagined and cost more than you're expecting. Organizations should make cyber preparedness plans that include broadening the use of immutable repositories, isolation and authentication of backup systems, and verifying the recoverability of the backups within the organization to ensure the established SLAs. Modern organizations should employ an incident response playbook or plan that allows for cross-team collaboration with the goal of utilizing a diversified immutable portfolio of disks, tapes, and clouds. And finally, being able to recover to both on-premises and cloud hosted infrastructure gives an organization its best potential to survive what could be an existential threat.
- Ensure your backups are clean and reliable: Similar to any disaster or cyber preparedness strategy, even daily backups require routine testing to ensure their viability on your worst day. For cyber resilience in particular, organizations need to test not only the recoverability of their backup data, but also the assurance of its cleanliness through immutable repositories.
The full report is available for download on the Veeam site (registration required).
About the Author
David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.