How to Protect Your Business From Ransomware at the Edge

By Florian Malecki, Executive Vice President of Marketing, Arcserve

It’s rare for an enterprise to meticulously organize its data in a single data center. The need for redundancy, performance, compliance and business continuity has resulted in most enterprises having multiple data centers. One global IT survey found that 33 percent of respondents said their company operates between three and five owned or collocated data centers.

While multiple data centers can create complexity, remote office/branch office (ROBO) environments—often essential to growing a business—bring even more challenges. Keeping these edge environments secure from ransomware isn’t easy because you’ll rarely have technical staff on hand, and these offices may be far from your primary data centers.

So what can you do to keep your edge ROBO environments safe from ransomware when that’s the case? Here are four tips for IT admins to help stop ransomware everywhere in your organization.

1. Start With Ransomware Prevention

As with all of your data centers, start by ensuring you have basic ransomware prevention measures in place. That can include firewalls, spam filters, anti-malware, and antivirus tools. Be sure all software is kept patched and up to date. And consider buying ransomware insurance or increasing your coverage to include new locations.

Most importantly, ensure your remote employees understand how to recognize and react to potential ransomware attacks. That includes spotting risky emails and phishing scams that could result in a ransomware attack and the steps they need to take if an attack is successful.

2. Create a Strategy for Remote Backup and Recovery

It isn’t always possible to protect remote networks from ransomware. That’s where a robust backup and recovery strategy makes all the difference by ensuring your business can get back up and running if your systems get locked down.

You also need to establish recovery objectives—your RTOs and RPOs—for each location. How much data can a particular location afford to lose (RPO)? How much downtime is acceptable (RTO)? You need to deploy solutions at these locations to meet these objectives and protect your data.

3. Understand ROBO Data Protection Essentials

Once your goals are set, it’s time to choose the best solution based on these ROBO essentials:

Flexible Backup

The solution should back up virtual and physical machines, store those backups locally, and easily replicate them to the cloud.

Recovery Options

You need options when recovery is required. Your selected solution should give you flexible, fast recovery options that make it easy to recover your data locally at the ROBO site or from the cloud, depending on a disaster’s severity.

Remote Management

You likely have multiple remote offices or branches, and each may have its own capabilities and recovery objectives. Your solution should include effective management tools that your IT team can use to handle each location’s unique requirements from anywhere. And it should allow your admins to remotely deploy different policies in different locations.

4. Choose Appliances to Support Advanced Disaster Recovery

Backup appliances are often used at ROBO sites that don't have resources or technical staff to manage servers. That lets admins deploy backup and disaster recovery solutions without the need to be onsite. Anyone from the branch can plug in the device and connect it to the internet.  

From there, your admins can remotely protect data by setting up backup schedules and retention policies. If a hardware failure or minor disaster strikes, your admins can use the device for instant failover. And because you can replicate data from the appliance to the cloud, a ROBO location can even spin up its entire site in the cloud should a big disaster bring it down.

Don’t Be Ravaged By Ransomware

ROBO environments are particularly vulnerable to data loss and downtime because they lack technical staff onsite to keep their systems humming. Add in the growing threat from ransomware, and admins have their work cut out for them. Fortunately, backup and disaster recovery appliances like Arcserve OneXafe make it easy for admins to prevent data loss, even when they can’t be onsite.

To get help ensuring your data is protected even in ROBO environments, talk to an expert Arcserve technology partner. And be sure to check out our free on-demand demos.