October Is Cybersecurity Awareness Month: Are Your Backups Secure and Compliant?

Cybersecurity Awareness Month, observed each October since 2004, is an initiative designed to enhance awareness and motivate everyone to strengthen their efforts in mitigating online risks. This collaboration between the public and private sectors has grown over time, with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) leading the way in promoting sound cybersecurity practices.

The “Secure Our World” theme continues for 2024, focusing on simple, daily actions that reduce risks when individuals are online and using connected devices. 

Backups: Your Last Line of Cybersecurity Defenses

While cybersecurity has many components, one of the most crucial is ensuring the security and compliance of your backups. 

That’s where the 3-2-1-1 backup strategy makes all the difference. It’s simple: Keep three copies of your data on two different media (network-attached storage, tape, or a local drive, for example), with one copy stored securely offsite and one saved to immutable storage.

Immutability is essential for defending against ransomware. Immutable backups are saved in a write-once-read-many (WORM) format that can’t be altered or deleted by unauthorized users, even admins. This gives you a last-line defense, so you can count on your backed-up data always being intact and available.

CISA Resources for Enhancing Cybersecurity and Data Protection

Throughout Cybersecurity Awareness Month, CISA is offering numerous resources to help you bolster your cybersecurity strategies and practices, including backup data protection. These resources emphasize best practices–like the 3-2-1-1 strategy—and offer guidelines for ensuring digital security and compliance.

Some helpful CISA resources include:

The Cybersecurity Awareness Month 2024 Toolkit, a collaboration between CISA and the National Cybersecurity Alliance (NCA), offers educational resources and messaging to build your own campaign. 

“Secure Our World” videos are also available. They offer simple, practical actions, including backups, to secure your data.

Visit the Cybersecurity Awareness Month website for more events, webinars, resources, and educational opportunities.

Now Is the Time to Build Your Defenses

Cybersecurity Month is your reminder to assess and improve your security and compliance efforts. Follow the 3-2-1-1 strategy, leverage immutable backups, and practice good cyber hygiene. Arcserve Unified Data Protection (UDP) simplifies doing all that and more, delivering all-in-one data protection software that helps you comprehensively retain, back up, and restore your data.

Arcserve UDP protects against data loss and extended downtime across cloud, local, virtual, hyperconverged, and SaaS-based workloads. You can also restore faster with instant VM and bare metal recovery (BMR), local and remote virtual standby, application-consistent backup and granular restore, hardware snapshot support, and extensions delivering high availability and tape support. And you can reduce your downtime from days to minutes and validate recovery time and point objectives (RTOs/RPOs) and service-level agreements (SLAs) with automated testing and granular reporting.

In honor of Cybersecurity Awareness Month, take action now and request an Arcserve UDP demo or start your 30-day free trial today.