4 Ways to Protect Your Business From Ransomware at the Edge

It’s rare for an enterprise to have its data neatly organized in one data center. As organizations grow, it’s typical to see remote/branch office (ROBO) environments being set up to support these expansions. It’s challenging to keep these environments secure from ransomware because they rarely have technical staff on-hand and may be far from primary data centers. So, how do you keep these remote offices safe from ransomware, even if an expert can’t be on site?  Let’s explore four tips for IT pros responsible for preventing ransomware, even at the farthest reaches of their organizations. 

1.   Focus on Ransomware Prevention First

Just as you would at your headquarters, ensure that you’re taking basic ransomware precautions. Use firewalls, spam filters, antimalware, and antivirus tools. Keep software patched and up to date. Consider purchasing ransomware insurance for your business or increasing your coverage to account for new locations. Most importantly, make sure remote employees understand the threat of ransomware. Teach them how to spot risky emails and phishing scams that can result in a ransomware attack and what steps to take if they’ve been infected.

2.   Develop a Remote Backup and Recovery Strategy

You might not always be able to prevent ransomware from infecting remote networks, but a robust backup and disaster recovery strategy can get you back on track if systems get locked down. Just as you would with any network, start by establishing recovery objectives. As you think about a particular location, understand how much data this branch can tolerate losing (recovery point objective) and how much downtime is acceptable (recovery time objective). The solutions you deploy at these locations must be able to meet these objectives or you’ll fail in your mission to protect data.

3.   Understand the Essentials for ROBO Data Protection

Once you set your goals, it’s time to find solutions that help you meet them. Outside of recovery objectives, consider these three remote office essentials:

• Flexible Backup
  Your solution should be able to back up virtual and physical machines, store those backups locally, and easily replicate them to the cloud.
• Recovery Options
  When it’s time to recover, you need options. You should be able to recover locally at a remote office or from the cloud depending on a disaster’s severity. You must be sure you have flexible, fast recovery options to hit your objectives.
• Remote Management
  You might have multiple branch offices with different environments, capabilities, and recovery objectives. The solution you use must allow you to manage each location’s unique objectives. That’s why it’s crucial that your solution be built with a robust set of management tools you can access anywhere. This system should let an admin remotely deploy different policies in different locations and perform a recovery for branch offices that might not have technical staff.

4.   Use Appliances for Superior DRaaS

Remote and branch offices may not have the resources or technical staff to manage servers or more complex environments. That’s why many admins use backup appliances for remote offices. Using StorageCraft OneXafe Solo, admins can deploy backup and disaster recovery without having to be onsite. Anyone at the branch office can plug in the device and connect it to the internet. From there, admins can remotely protect data by setting backup schedules and retention policies. If there’s a hardware failure or minor disaster, admins can use the device for instant failover. And, because data can be replicated from OneXafe Solo to the StorageCraft Cloud, a branch office can even spin up its entire site in the cloud should a big disaster bring it down.

Conclusion

ROBO environments are particularly vulnerable to data loss and downtime since there’s rarely technical staff on-site to keep an eye on their systems. Add to that the growing threat of ransomware and admins have their work cut out for them. Luckily, backup and disaster recovery appliances make it easy for administrators to prevent data loss caused by failure events or ransomware, even when they can’t be on site.

Are you trying to sort out ROBO data protection for your organization? Reach out to our sales engineers to get a custom demo of StorageCraft’s next-generation edge protection solutions.