The security landscape is changing rapidly and attacks are becoming more sophisticated and complex. At the same time, businesses worldwide are digitizing their workflows and relying on cloud platforms to carry out their operations.
While these tools are great for storing data and interacting with customers, they can also make businesses more vulnerable to cybercrime. In 2022, one in three businesses experienced data loss from these types of SaaS platforms.
Now more than ever businesses need to become cyber resilient by incorporating a layered approach to security that includes steps for prevention, protection, and recovery. When a breach or other disaster happens, every business should have systems in place to minimize loss and resume business as soon as possible.
Why You Need to Prepare to Restore and Recover Data
Data security and cyberattack prevention often get the most focus, but a comprehensive approach to cyber resiliency must consider business continuity and recovery too. Any business downtime can put your customers, your reputation, your digital infrastructure, and your business model at risk.
There are a number of things that can cause disruption, business downtime, and data and device vulnerability. An attack or breach is only one threat you need to be prepared to recover from. Data loss can also occur from:
1. Human error
Humans make mistakes all the time. An employee could accidentally wipe out data that you need.
2. Natural disaster
Hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, tornados, and fire can all pose a threat to on-site servers.
3. Storage and system failures
Hardware and network failures prevent access to your applications and data which disrupt your business operations.
When these events happen, you want the right tools in place to restore your data quickly.
Principles of a Strong Restore and Recovery Strategy
In order to be cyber resilient, consider implementing the following strategies:
1. SaaS application continuity
It’s easy to believe that using a cloud-based application means your data is backed up and secure, but it’s not. SaaS vendors explicitly state that data protection and backup is the responsibility of the customer, yet many businesses rely on the native recovery options.
Those options are limited and ineffective. Deleted files are only stored in an application’s trash bin for a matter of weeks, while the average time to detect a breach is ten months. By the time most companies notice an attack has happened, it’s too late to restore from the application alone.
Having a separate backup is not just necessary to ensure business continuity, but it’s also required to remain regulation compliant. GDPR, HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, New York’s SHIELD, and California’s CCPA all require that a business prove it can recover information after a loss.
OpenText Cybersecurity’s Carbonite™ Cloud-to-Cloud Backup protects critical data stored on SaaS platforms by automating backups, encrypting the information, and keeping it secure so that you can restore data quickly.
2. Cloud system recovery
Companies throughout the world are transitioning to hybrid operations where they use a mix of local servers and cloud system storage for storing data and doing business. As they expand their digital footprint, they’re also expanding their risk of cybercrime and data loss between systems.
In the event of a breach or other disaster, you need a cohesive and continual backup that will allow a full restoration.
OpenText Cybersecurity’s Carbonite Server Backup provides a secure and continuously updated backup for critical local and cloud servers. With this tool, you can manage your backups and recover specific data or entire systems when needed.
3. Disaster recovery
You can have every tool in place for preventing and protecting against cyber attacks and still be susceptible to data loss from natural disasters, hardware failures or power outages. Many of these events give us little to no warning, so being prepared to restore data at any time is necessary.
OpenText Cybersecurity’s Carbonite Recover is a continuously updated, running backup of critical servers and systems that lets you failover to an up-to-date copy with just a few clicks and within minutes.
All of these tools are part of OpenText Cybersecurity, providing you with all three aspects of recovery protection through a single provider in addition to tools that address the prevention and protection layers of a cyber resilient approach.
One customer’s experience
The team at My Father’s World, a Christian homeschool curriculum provider located in tornado country, constantly worried about system backups and disaster recovery.
Initially they ran a parallel physical server system that was located eight miles from their primary servers, using software to backup between the two locations. That approach became too expensive and time consuming as the business grew. That’s when My Father’s World began using cloud-hosted versions of Carbonite Server Backup and Carbonite™ Cloud Disaster Recovery by OpenText.
Carbonite Server Backup stores copies locally as well as in the Carbonite cloud and provides business continuity and data protection while meeting compliance regulations. Carbonite Cloud Disaster Recovery provides a fully managed service with a remote team of continuity and disaster recovery specialists that ensure the recovery of the business’s critical systems in the cloud.
My Father’s World signed up for the 48-hour recovery service, but in yearly tests, a full recovery has been achieved in just nine hours, while recovery of a specific file only takes minutes.
Guest blog courtesy of OpenText Cybersecurity. Regularly contributed guest blogs are part of MSSP Alert’s sponsorship program.
