Best Protections for Data Backups

From the distant past going forward, the need for businesses to retain data has been a necessity and in the digital age, this need continues to grow in its complexity. Simply assuming that your data and your backups are safe is dangerous and potentially damaging.

Viruses, hard drive crashes, theft, and Ransomware are just a few of the ways data is lost. Most people using any type of technology have experienced data loss at least once.

There are about 140,000 hard drive crashes in the US every week – averaging out at 20,000 per day. Within every five year time span, 20% of Small and Mid-size Businesses (SMBs) suffer data loss due to a major disaster. This has helped to fuel a robust cloud backup market that continues to grow.

The danger remains if you labor under the false assumption that your data backups are automatically protected once they’re in the cloud. They are NOT.

Cybersecurity continues to evolve and change in regard to data backup. Simply backing up data to avoid losing it is not enough anymore. Data protection must move to the forefront of any backup solution.

It’s wise to have an in-depth discussion with your IT services professional – whether an internal IT Support Department or external Managed Services Provider.

What does data protection mean?

Simply put, data protection means that backups need more Cybersecurity protection than what is typically in play with the main network because they face threats such as sleeper ransomware and supply chain attacks. Cloud-based backup has the benefit of being convenient, accessible, and effective, but there is also a need for certain security considerations with an online service.

Not a single one of the major cloud providers like Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), or Amazon Web Services (AWS) guarantee that your data is protected against data breach – that is up to you and whatever IT services you use.

You need to consider data protection when planning a Backup and Disaster Recovery strategy, and the tools you use need to protect against an ever-growing number of threats.

Some of the current significant threats:

Sleeper Ransomware: ‘Standard’ Ransomware locks up your system as soon as it’s let in, but this newer strain is crafty. It gets in and hides, staying dormant until it receives a predetermined cue. In the meantime, it snakes through the system and infect all your backups. Once activated, the victim doesn’t have a clean backup to restore – unless the victim has good IT Support which has set up backups unconnected to the operating network.

Data Center Mishap: The cloud is nothing more than a data center filled with servers that house your data but are connected to the internet and can therefore be hacked. They can also crash. Data centers holding the servers can have outages and are not immune to fires, floods, and earthquakes.

Supply Chain Attacks: There has been a lot of buzz about the vulnerabilities of the supply chain in the last few of years and attacks on aspects of the supply chain for the IT services industry have been growing. They include attacks on cloud vendors that companies use. Once those vendors suffer a cyberattack it can easily be spread to their clients.

Misconfiguration: Misconfiguration (click the link to learn more) of security settings is a very real problem, and it’s self-inflicted. It can allow attackers to gain access to cloud storage. Those attackers can then download and delete files as they like.

What makes a good backup plan?

Whatever backup solution you center on, you need to make sure the applications you use provides adequate data protection. Here are some of the things to look for when reviewing a backup solution:

Ransomware Prevention

Ransomware’s typical modus operandi is to spread throughout a network to infect any data that exists, including data on computers, servers, and mobile devices. It can also infect data in any cloud platform syncing with those devices. 95% of ransomware attacks also try to infect data backup systems.

Any data backup solution you deploy must have protection from ransomware. This type of feature restricts the automated file changes that can happen to documents.

A secure, reliable backup system MUST be unconnected to the main network. If it’s connected, it’s infected. One relatively inexpensive solution is a solid state external hard drive.

Continuous Data Protection

This is different than systems that back up on a schedule, like once per day. Continuous data protection will back up files as users make changes.

This will mitigate the amount of data that is lost after a system crash or ransomware attack, because recovery includes re-installing the data. If the last backup was the previous night, you’ve lost all the data generated today. With the speed of data generation these days, losing a day’s or even a few hours’ worth of data can be very costly.

Threat Identification

Be sure to incorporate proactive measures in your data protection measures. When selecting a backup service, look for threat identification functions - a type of malware and virus prevention tool.

Threat identification tools seek out and identify malware in new and existing backups. This helps stop sleeper ransomware and similar malware from infecting all backups.

Zero-Trust Tactics

Anyone who considers themself a bona-fide Cybersecurity professional will be using zero-trust security measures which include multi-factor authentication and application ‘safelisting’. The zero-trust approach requires that all users and applications need ongoing authentication – no free passes.

Some of the zero-trust features to look for include:

Multi-factor authentication

Distinct file and folder permissions

Contextual authentication

Verification of permissions for file changes

Redundancy

You should keep at least 3 copies of your data – as in the 3-2-1 strategy: 2 local copies on different devices and 1 copy off-site. If you back up to a USB drive or CD, you have one copy of those files. If something happens to that copy, you could experience data loss.

Any cloud backup provider you consider should have backup redundancy in place. This means that the server holding your data mirrors that data to another server (cloud to cloud). This prevents data loss in the case of a server crash, natural disaster, or cyberattack.

Air Gapping for More Sensitive Data

Air gapping is a system that keeps a copy of your data separate from your network – either offline or in another way. This entails making at least a second backup copy of your data, then putting it on another server which is unconnected from external sources (internet).

This is a feature that you would be wise to look into if you deal with highly sensitive data. It helps to ensure that you have at least one other copy of your backup, which is walled off from common internet-based attacks.

Think of Tom Cruise in the first Mission Impossible movie entering the CIA’s mainframe room by suspending himself from the ceiling. The only way to access their data was to be at the keyboard in that room.

Make it impossible for cybercriminals to get to every copy of your backups.