The threat of ransomware attacks is becoming more prevalent, increasing the risk of data loss for individuals and organizations. New hacking techniques, AI-driven encryption algorithms, and advanced social engineering can target production environments and storage media containing backup data.
A simple data copy is not enough to protect your organization’s digital assets and support production continuity. Secure backups are essential to ensure data safety and recoverability. NAKIVO Backup & Replication can help you protect backups from ransomware and minimize the risk of data loss caused by malware infections.
How Ransomware Reaches and Affects Backups
A typical ransomware attack has three steps. First, a malicious code is delivered and executed inside the target environment. To bypass security and infiltrate protected systems, hackers usually use phishing emails or other social engineering techniques that mainly rely on human error.
Once inside, ransomware spreads across the workloads and storage repositories in the environment and encrypts all the data it reaches. Lastly, the victim of a successful ransomware attack receives the extortion demand. Hackers normally demand payment in exchange for the decryption key, otherwise they threaten to delete the data or make it public.
Protecting backups from ransomware requires a strategy that includes backup copy, thorough management, as well as access control and recoverability verification. You can easily build effective backup protection using a suitable data protection solution.
Download the NAKIVO Backup & Replication free trial to test the features within your environment and learn how the solution can help you safeguard your data from ransomware.
Key Features of NAKIVO Backup & Replication for Ransomware Protection
The ransomware protection solution from NAKIVO enables you to create data backups and keep them recoverable in case of cyberattacks. NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides a set of features that help you implement a full-scale data protection strategy in physical, virtual, cloud, and hybrid environments.
The first functionality in NAKIVO Backup & Replication for protecting backups from ransomware is backup immutability. When active, immutability protects backups from alteration or deletion and prevents ransomware from encrypting your data. Immutable backups remain recoverable even if ransomware reaches your backup repository, so you can restore data without paying ransom to hackers.
Multiple destinations to store immutable backups ensure redundancy of recoverable data. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, you can set the immutability period for backup data in:
- Local Linux-based repositories
- NAS
- Deduplication appliances
- Public clouds (Amazon S3, Azure Blob, Wasabi, Backblaze B2)
- S3-compatible storage platforms
The combination of immutability and multiple repositories enables efficient ransomware resilience for backup data. However, multiple data storage destinations with critical records normally require additional effort to ensure their security.
The complexity of IT environments and the volume of data to back up can pose administration challenges for both SMBs and enterprise organizations. The advanced scheduling and automation capabilities of NAKIVO Backup & Replication can reduce the effort required to maintain the system and timely update backups across the repositories. In addition, you can set policy-based workflows to automatically back up workloads and data that match specific criteria such as the file or machine name, folder size, or data location.
Use these features to build a resilient system that ensures efficient anti-ransomware backup protection. With backup scheduling, policy-based workflow automation, and multiple repositories containing immutable data copies, you can develop a reliable ransomware backup strategy that ensures the recoverability of backups.
Building a Ransomware Backup Strategy with NAKIVO
A ransomware backup strategy focuses on neutralizing or mitigating the outcomes of an attack when it occurs. The main objective is to ensure backup data accessibility and recoverability after ransomware hits your organization’s infrastructure and manages to encrypt some data.
When implementing a ransomware backup strategy, consider the following:
- Backup tiering – the renowned 3-2-1 rule states that you should create three backup copies and store them on two different media with one copy sent offsite to the cloud or tape. With the NAKIVO solution, you can tier backups and send them to as many immutable storage repositories as needed to ensure the needed resilience.
- Recoverability testing – NAKIVO Backup & Replication enables backup verification and non-disruptive tests to ensure data recoverability. Implement regular testing workflows to guarantee that your backups are up-to-date and recoverable whenever the need arises.
- Multi-factor authentication – the solution supports the 2FA functionality. You can add a time-based one-time password or an email verification code to the login procedure and improve the security of your NAKIVO account.
- Role-based access control – grant access to data protection activities based on user roles. This helps you minimize the impact of human error.
- Backup data encryption – encrypting backups in flight and at rest can help prevent data interception and unauthorized third-party access to sensitive records.
- Instant VM recovery – boot VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines directly from backups. Restore the production network right after a ransomware attack and avoid downtime.
Conclusion
To recover from ransomware attacks, organizations must have secure backups. A reliable ransomware backup strategy involves tiering backups, enabling backup immutability, testing recoverability, and ensuring fast recovery of critical workloads.
NAKIVO Backup & Replication is an all-in-one solution to create, manage, maintain, and protect backups from ransomware. Multiple storage destinations, advanced automation, scheduling, security, and recovery features can help both SMBs and enterprises have accessible and recoverable backups in any scenario. Ensure strong protection of your backups, recover data and restore production after ransomware attacks without paying ransom to hackers.
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