Backup Strategy: Prevention, Protection, and Recovery

FEBRUARY 9TH, 2022

By Danny Ullrich, Marketing Manager, Arcserve

Businesses saw a 50 percent increase in cyberattacks per week in 2021, due, in part, to the Log4j vulnerability, which helped push cyberattack attempts to an all-time high in Q4 2021. A recent ZDNet headline proclaimed, “Ransomware in 2022: We’re all screwed.” Every small, medium and large business needs to take these threats seriously—especially companies that don’t have security experts on their internal team. That’s why backing up your data is the single most important "last line of defense" you should implement. Today, backing up your data is much more than just copying it to another storage medium. So, what should companies consider when planning and setting up a backup process to protect themselves against ransomware and cyberattacks?

Prevention, Protection, and Recovery Basics

Three stages need to be carefully considered and included in your disaster recovery plan: prevention, protection, and recovery. Addressing and coordinating these stages gives your company the best chance of recovering from a cyberattack or ransomware infiltration.

Cyberattack Prevention

Prevention includes backup and recovery but also takes security into account. Ideally, security should not be set up independently from your backups. Instead, it should be integrated into your overall data protection strategy. That's why we have tightly integrated an artificial intelligence- (AI) supported security ecosystem into our Arcserve UDP appliances. Regardless of the security solution you use for your endpoints, with Sophos Intercept X integrated with Arcserve UDP, you get additional, dedicated protection for your backups.

Data Protection

Protection describes the structure and architecture you choose for your backups. That could include snapshots, local storage, disk, tape, remote sites, or cloud instances. Immutable storage is another critical consideration. Ideally, your solution—or combination of solutions—should allow for any backup model while efficiently scaling as the company grows.

When disaster strikes, recovery is your highest priority. You need to ensure that your systems and data can be recovered with a clearly defined RTO and RPO. One of the fastest ways to recover is the capability to power up your critical systems in virtual instances in the cloud until your systems are recovered in your core infrastructure. This is your last line of defense.

Planning and Coordination Come First

The most important step in your backup strategy is making sure the backup and disaster recovery solution you choose meets your company’s specific requirements. That requires expert analysis. For many companies—especially medium-sized companies—one of Arcserve’s specialized partners can provide that support.

Of course, your disaster recovery plan is just as important as the planning and implementation of your solution. When disaster strikes, everyone involved must know what they need to do and the order in which they need to do it. Prioritizing critical data and systems is essential for shortening or even preventing failures. You also need to address many other planning details, including having alternate communication channels, as your normal channels may be interrupted in the event of a cyberattack. And it is imperative to test your backup and recovery plan regularly. That way, you can ensure that your recovery process works as expected and that your emergency team is well prepared.

Flexible Immutable Storage Options

While there are a variety of Immutable storage systems available, at Arcserve, we believe that immutable storage must adapt to your specific infrastructure. That's why we offer a wide variety of solutions, including OneXafe, which features scalable object-based immutable storage, as well as solutions that seamlessly integrate tape or cloud storage into your overall backup and recovery solution. Arcserve’s immutable storage can be integrated into any existing infrastructure as an add-on, so even if you are using other backup software, Arcserve provides an added level of security.

Keeping Ransomware Out

Typical disk storage is available as a shared network resource to ensure fast backups and restoration. Because OneXafe is object-based, when the immutable snapshots are written to storage, they cannot be modified by ransomware. That limits your maximum data loss to the time interval between each snapshot. With Arcserve, those intervals between snapshots can be extremely short, so your data loss is kept to a minimum.