Protecting their organization's data is front of mind for IT pros these days. But that isn't easy because ransomware is rampant. According to Sophos’ The State of Ransomware 2021 report, 37 percent of respondents had experienced an attack in the previous year. While those numbers were lower than the year before, the costs of a ransomware attack have more than doubled, reaching $1.85 million this year. Sophos attributes the increase to attackers using more sophisticated attack vectors that make recovery more complex.
As hard as this may be to believe, it gets worse. This week the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the National Security Agency (NSA) issued a joint Cybersecurity Advisory warning regarding BlackMatter, a ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) tool that lets ransomware’s developers profit via cybercriminal affiliates. Now that ransomware is available as a service, it’s time for you to consider data protection as a service (DPaaS) to elevate your defenses. More on DPaaS later.
Start By Mitigating Your Risk
The Cybersecurity Advisory includes a list of recommended strategies for reducing your risk. That's an excellent place to start. Here’s a quick recap:
- Implement detection signatures
- Use strong passwords
- Deploy multi-factor authentication
- Patch and update systems
- Limit access to resources over the network
- Implement network segmentation and traversal monitoring
- Use admin disabling tools to support identity access management (IAM) and privileged access management (PAM)
- Establish and enforce backup and data restoration policies and procedures
Keeping Up with Security Threats and Solutions Isn’t Easy
IT teams already face challenges staying up to date with the latest technologies to support evolving business demands—especially as digital transformation becomes the norm. Addressing the mitigations list above while keeping everything up to date adds another set of challenges. That’s especially true as, while IT teams know technology, deep in-house security experience is often lacking. It isn’t unusual for internal IT teams to look outside for expert help solving specific problems. But protecting your data is a problem that won’t ever go away. And network security isn’t going to get any easier. Then there are the challenges that come with making sure your disaster recovery capabilities are effective. For all of those reasons, DPaaS is a solution that’s worth a long second look.
Unified Data Protection Is the Answer
DPaaS offers you a comprehensive strategy that includes data protection, network, security, and disaster recovery capabilities rolled into a single, cloud-based subscription service. The three components of DPaaS are:
Backup as a Service (BaaS)
The best way to ensure you can recover from an attack—or any disaster for that matter—is to make frequent backup copies of company files and databases. With your data stored securely in the cloud, you can be confident that you can recover.
Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)
DRaaS is all about minimizing business disruptions by protecting your company’s data, applications, and infrastructure from loss or damages caused by a natural disaster, cyberattack, or technology failure. The goal of DRaaS is to get your business back in operation as quickly as possible.
Storage as a Service (STaaS)
While STaaS can't replace secure, offsite backup solutions, it provides cost-effective file storage in a centralized location accessible from any device. The benefit here is a reduction in more costly local storage requirements.
DPaaS Unburdens IT and Mitigates Risk
While peace of mind—and certainty in your disaster recovery capabilities—are two of the most important reasons to choose DPaaS, IT teams and business leaders also see direct benefits. For business leaders, DPaaS reduces IT expenses by eliminating the ongoing costs of maintaining and supporting data protection and disaster recovery in-house. Storage costs are also contained with DPaaS because you only pay for the storage you need.
IT teams and business leaders also see the benefits of DPaaS solutions’ ability to automate the processes that orchestrate your recovery workflow. Your IT team simply defines critical dependencies and sets the order and timing of recovery. With DPaaS, you can be confident that the correct backups are restored —and you can meet your RTOs and RPOs. Speaking of backups, DPaaS also automates backups on your schedule, so you can be sure you have an up-to-date (immutable) copy of your data that lets you recover to a point in time before your data was encrypted, deleted, or corrupted.
DPaaS Stands Out from Traditional Data Protection
There are plenty of data protection solutions available today that are effective to some degree. Here are the key reasons DPaaS stands apart:
- Faster data transfer
- Faster backups
- Instant data restoration
- Data protection at the application and database layers
- Increased resilience
Want to learn more about DPaaS for your business? Contact us to learn how Arcserve can help you make a move. And download our ebook, Your Guide to a Ransomware-Free Future.
