4 Ways Snapshots Can Save You From Ransomware

Ransomware is insidious. One click on a link, one download of what looks like a legitimate attachment, and your systems are toast. And it’s getting harder and harder to spot social engineering ploys like phishing these days. According to DarkReading, modern ransomware operators are changing their tactics, using advanced nation-state actors’ attacks as a model and taking a quieter, more long-term strategy. Regardless of the approach, it’s still extortion and it can badly hurt or even kill a company, as happened to a telemarketing firm in Arkansas late last year. It’s not getting any safer out there, either. According to Safety Detectives, 54% of US organizations reported ransomware attacks in the last year. That means odds are about 50/50 that you’ll be next. Obviously, prevention is your best defense. That means educating your people to spot suspicious emails and other social engineering attack vehicles. You may even want to enlist a specialized training company to help you shore up your defenses through ongoing training and education programs.Unfortunately, no matter how tight your security practices, ransomware can still infect your systems. At that point, your only focus will be on recovery, and your backups are essential to making that happen. That’s also when snapshots will help you recover faster, more efficiently, and with certainty.

1. Snapshots Deliver Continuous Data Protection

Snapshots capture the state of your storage system at a given recovery point and are the key element of continuous data protection (CDP). With snapshots, new data is captured soon after it is created and securely stored. StorageCraft® OneXafe® takes a snapshot every 90 seconds and can support an infinite number of snapshots.

2. Snapshots Are Immutable

Snapshots are read-only—they can’t be altered, overwritten, or deleted. Snapshot files are also relatively small because each snapshot only contains the data that has changed since the previous snapshot—the snapshots are deduplicated with the primary data objects. That means no bandwidth or network bottlenecks when backing up and replicating snapshots to another OneXafe cluster. And, if you’re hit with ransomware, you can be confident that you can get your data back.

3. Snapshots Make Recovery Easy

With snapshots and recovery points every 90 seconds for the first hour ransomware attacks are just a hiccup. OneXafe lets you easily go back to the time of your choosing and instantly restore any compromised data from a snapshot. In fact, with OneXafe you can recover any size share, from terabytes to petabytes, in less than 15 seconds.

4. Snapshots Let You Test Fearlessly

By creating a clone of data, you can test it using a snapshot without altering the actual share itself. So you can spin up new software and services in a virtual test environment without worrying about impacts on your data.

Conclusion

Snapshots protect your unstructured data and backup files so you can be confident that you'll be able to meet a shorter RPO where you only lose seconds vs. hours or days, and a faster RTO where you can recover in 15 seconds instead of the days it typically takes to restore hundreds of terabytes. To learn more about how StorageCraft OneXafe gives you enterprise-class data protection and snapshot-fast recovery check out our ransomware bundle offer today.