Our previous articles in the series covered the basics of immutable storage and took a deep dive into the immutable backup storage framework. So, this time, we’re taking an even more focused look, albeit on a rather broad topic - an immutability-conscious backup strategy.
The consequences of losing critical data can be catastrophic, ranging from financial losses and reputational damage to legal repercussions.
Not all backup strategies are equally effective. Conventional backup methods frequently prove inadequate against advanced cyber threats such as ransomware, which can encrypt or erase your backups and primary data. This conundrum is where adding immutability to your backup storage comes into play.
This article outlines the essential elements of an effective backup plan that emphasizes immutability, enabling you to establish a strong set of requirements for your backup strategy, focusing on utilizing immutable backups as a foundational component.
Understanding Immutability in Backup Strategies
Immutability plays a crucial role in backup strategies. Traditional backup methods are insufficient as cyber threats evolve and become more sophisticated. Organizations must adopt a proactive approach to data protection, incorporating immutability as a core component of their backup strategy.
Ransomware attacks encrypt or delete data, including backups, making them ineffective and forcing organizations to pay the ransom or confront data loss. Organizations can create a secure, unchangeable copy of their data by leveraging immutable backups, ensuring protection against such attacks.
Ransomware is not a phantom threat, as over 90% of ransomware attacks target backup data, while 82% of last year's ransomware attacks targeted companies with fewer than 1000 employees. Whether you’re big or small – it doesn’t matter to perpetrators.
There’s another overlooked aspect. Immutable backups offer enhanced protection against accidental deletions, insider threats, and data loss scenarios.
With immutable storage of your backups, you can set retention periods for your backups, ensuring they cannot be modified or deleted until the specified time has elapsed. This flexibility provides another layer of security and compliance, as you can guarantee the integrity and availability of your data for a predetermined period.
Why Immutability Matters for Data Security
One of the primary reasons why immutability matters for data security is that it prevents unauthorized changes to your backup data. Once data is written to an immutable storage system, it cannot be modified, overwritten, or deleted for a specified period. This capability ensures that your backups remain intact and untampered, even if an attacker gains access to your systems or an insider attempts to manipulate the data.
Immutability is particularly crucial for organizations in heavily regulated industries, such as healthcare and finance. These industries have strict data retention and protection requirements, mandating the preservation of data integrity and availability. Immutable backups assist organizations in fulfilling regulatory requirements by offering an auditable, tamper-proof copy of readily retrievable data when necessary.
Key Components of an Immutability-Conscious Backup Strategy
Creating an effective immutability-conscious backup strategy requires careful planning and consideration of several key components. Addressing these essential elements enables organizations to ensure their data is protected, recoverable, and aligned with business requirements.
We'll now go over some of the core elements of ANY backup strategy and explore which considerations you need to consider for immutable backups as part of each core element.
Assessing and Prioritizing Data
The first step in developing an immutability-conscious backup strategy is to assess and prioritize your organization's data. Not all data is created equal, and it is essential to identify which data sets are critical to your business operations and require the highest level of protection. This process involves conducting a thorough data inventory, classifying data based on sensitivity and importance, and determining the appropriate backup frequency and retention periods for each data set.
Creating immutable backups of all your data may not be practical. Prioritizing your data allows you to manage backup resources better and ensure that your most valuable data receives the best possible protection.
Selecting an Appropriate Backup Solution
Choosing the right backup solution is crucial for implementing an immutability-conscious backup strategy. Various backup technologies are available, each with its strengths and limitations. Some standard backup solutions include:
- Disk-based backups: These backups store data on hard disk drives (HDDs) or solid-state drives (SSDs), providing fast backup and recovery times.
- Tape-based backups: Tape backups use magnetic tape to store data, offering high capacity and long-term data retention capabilities.
- Cloud backups: Cloud-based backup solutions store data in remote, off-site data centers, providing scalability, flexibility, and geographic redundancy.
- Immutable storage: Immutable storage solutions, such as write-once and read-many (WORM) storage, ensure that data cannot be modified or deleted once written, providing an extra layer of protection against ransomware and other threats.
When selecting a backup solution, consider scalability, performance, cost, and compatibility with your existing infrastructure. It is also essential to choose a solution that supports immutability, as this ensures that your backups remain tamper-proof and recoverable even in the event of a cyber-attack or data corruption. Even if immutable backup storage is not a part of your immediate data protection strategy, it's essential to have that option available.
Did you know about Arcserve Cyber Resilient Storage? It provides a reliable and cost-effective option for ransomware protection and compliance alignment by delivering immutable backup storage for cloud and on-premises workloads, seamlessly integrated with Arcserve UDP 10.
Developing a Backup Schedule
A well-defined backup schedule is essential for ensuring your data is consistently protected and can be recovered in a disaster recovery scenario. Your backup schedule should consider the criticality of your data, the rate of data change, and your recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs).
Consider implementing a multi-tiered backup strategy that includes:
- Full backups: Complete copies of your data, typically performed weekly or monthly.
- Incremental backups: Backups that capture only the changes made since the last backup, usually performed daily.
- Differential backups: These backups capture all changes made since the last full backup and are performed less frequently than incremental backups.
Combining various backup kinds allows you to find a balance between backup efficiency and recovery granularity, ensuring that your data is restored promptly and with minimal data loss.
The same rules apply to everything you choose to backup using your immutable backup solution. Consider several forms of immutable backups, such as backup snapshots, as they can have a significant impact on your backup schedule, speed, and approach to data restoration.
Implementing Security Measures
Securing your backups is just as important as securing your primary data. Immutable backups provide a strong foundation for data security, but you should implement additional measures to protect your backup environment further. Ensure that your immutable backup solution includes strong security safeguards, just as they would for your primary backup destinations. These measures include:
- Encryption: Encrypting your backup data both in transit and at rest ensures that it remains confidential and secure, even if it falls into the wrong hands.
- Access controls: Implementing strict access controls, such as role-based access and multi-factor authentication, prevents unauthorized access to your backup systems and data.
- Air-gapping: Physically or logically isolating your backup environment from your primary network adds an extra layer of protection against cyber threats.
- Regularly updating and patching: Keeping your backup software and infrastructure updated with the latest security patches and updates helps prevent vulnerabilities and exploits.
Testing and Monitoring Backups
Backups should be tested and monitored regularly to ensure that they can be effectively retrieved when necessary. Perform periodic restore tests to ensure that your backups are intact and recoverable. These tests should cover a variety of scenarios, including complete system restores, granular data recovery, and disaster recovery simulations.
In addition to testing, continuously monitor your backup environment for any anomalies or failures. Implement alerting and reporting mechanisms to notify you of any issues that require attention, such as failed backups or unusual activity. By proactively monitoring your backups, you can quickly identify and resolve problems before they impact your ability to recover data.
While immutable backups might seem more immune to testing and monitoring requirements, as data stays, well, immutable, it's still important to maintain a schedule with immutable backups, too. You would not want to be surprised when you actually need to restore your data.
Conclusion
By investing in a comprehensive and immutability-focused backup strategy, you not only protect your data but also strengthen your organization's overall resilience and ability to withstand disruptions. A robust backup strategy is a critical component of a broader business continuity plan, enabling you to minimize downtime, maintain productivity, and safeguard your reputation in the face of adversity.
We encourage you to take action now and start implementing the strategies and best practices discussed in this guide.
Arcserve Cyber Resilient Storage allows you to bounce back from ransomware attacks with consistent, immutable backups managed from a single intuitive interface. Learn more now.
