3 Tips for Protecting your Company Against Ransomware Attacks

Ransomware has been on a rise this year and is expected to rise even more in the coming years. Ransomware damages are expected to cost $11.5 billion in 2019 and about $20 billion by 2021. The good news, however, is that there are relatively easy things any company can do to protect themselves from an attack and also recover from an attack if an attack happens to strike.

Implement The 3-2-1 Backup Strategy

One of the simplest and cost-effective things a company can do to protect themselves against ransomware attacks is to implement a cloud backup a strategy which is reliable and effective. This is where the 3-2-1 strategy comes in and since it is so effective, it is widely used.

The 3-2-1 strategy states that you should have three copies of data, stored on two different types of storage media and one of those copies should be stored offsite.

To further clarify this, it simply means that the three copies should be your production copy and the other two should be backup copies. The two backup copies should be on different types of media such as a separate network-attached storage (NAS) device and finally, one of those copies should be at an offsite location or in the cloud. Backup to Azure can be used for cloud backups.

Stay Updated on Security Patches

One of the most primary targets for hackers are operating systems, software, and device firmware. If these are not updated with the latest security patches, hackers figure out and take advantage of the vulnerabilities in the systems and this can help them to launch an attack, so keeping them updated with the latest security patch is very important.

Regularly check for updates and whenever an update comes, install it immediately. If this seems like a lot of work, security updates can be automated. Simply allow updates to be updated automatically whenever a new update comes and it will install on its own.

Educate Employees

Hackers often launch attacks through phishing emails and if employees are not trained well enough to distinguish between a phishing email and a regular one, they might fall prey to these scams.

Phishing emails usually have, grammatical mistakes, urgency inclined towards making you do or click something, an attractive offer about a product or a notice stating that something has happened to your bank or apple account but these emails usually have an unauthentic domain name. Backup disaster recovery solution techniques must be adopted to save your data from disasters.

Conclusion

Ransomware is a hot topic and will continue spreading the heat in 2020. Making sure that your company is protected against ransomware has become a topic priority nowadays. Cloud backups, Veeam backup to Azure and the above tips can help greatly to achieve it.

Disaster Recovery Testing-Key to a successful DR

Disasters can occur at any time and at any place and can be very cruel. Having a disaster recovery plan sure can help an enterprise in protecting their data but in order for it to do that, it needs to work first. The only way to know for sure that your disaster recovery plan will actually work is to test it, regularly.

Exactly How is Testing Important for an Enterprise

So much emphasis is made on building a disaster recovery plan but enterprises often forget that they actually need to make sure that their DR plan works or not.

An untested plan is just a set of steps in which some things might work and some might not. In order to ensure efficiency, all the steps of a DR plan should work. So, testing your DR backup plan is as important as setting up one.

Decide What Needs to be Tested

Testing a DR plan maybe simple or a bit complex, depending on your system. If there is only a single testing, then it may be quite simple rather than a multi-tiered system. Depending upon the criticality of your system, you need to test the plan accordingly.

Testing Frequency

Having talked about the importance of a DR plan testing it is also important to know the frequency of the tests performed on it.

The testing frequency should be based on how often your plan changes. If it changes a lot, then it should also be testing a lot frequently. If not so much, then it’s okay to test it only once a while.

To emphasize more on this, workloads or systems that don’t change at all only need to be tested maybe once a year, while workloads that tend to change a lot need to be regularly tested throughout the year.

More Efficient Disaster Recovery

Testing your DR plan enables you to identify any errors or issues encountered while recovering your data. This helps greatly as it pin-points exactly what the issue is and allows you to resolve it so that, at the time of actually needed recovery, there are no issues and all your files and systems are recovered, easily and efficiently.

Conclusion

Testing your DR plan is undoubtedly a very vital part of any DR backup plan. It can help greatly in identifying the issues or problems you might face while recovering your files and gives you an idea of whether your DR backup plan works or not. To ensure a more efficient DR backup plan, make sure you test your plan regularly. veeam cloud connect azure is also good for doing data backups.

What is Veeam Backup & Replication and how does it work

Introduction:

Veeam Backup & Replication is a data protection software that has been very popular in many organizations in the past 12 years. It is known for its efficient protection of the infrastructure and all critical workloads (virtual, physical and cloud based). With a single console, achieve fast, flexible and reliable backup, recovery and replication of all applications and data.

Backup:

Veeam Backup & Replication appliance supports software-defined storage (SDS) technology. It allows organizing a scalable backup repository from a collection of heterogeneous storage devices. Backups can be stored on-premises, transferred to off-site repositories, saved to tape media for long-term retention, or can simply be sent to cloud storage. Cloud storage support is available on an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) model. Veeam's technology, Cloud Connect, provides integrated and secured backup to the cloud through Veeam-powered service providers (like Stonefly).

Veeam Backup & Replication uses storage system snapshots as a source for backups and recovery of VMware Virtual Machines (VMs) with disks residing on storage volumes. This way you can backup data at any point in time.

Replication:

Replication works alongside backup. It can perform image based Virtual Machines (VMs) replication. It creates a ‘clone’ of a production VM onsite or offsite and keeps it in a ready-to-use state so that it can be used instantly when needed. Each VM image has a configurable number of failover points which can be useful as during a ‘failover’ you experience near zero data loss.

 Recovery:

This software provides a number of data recovery options with a response time of 10-30 minutes.

-        Entire VM Recovery: 

      An immediate restore of a VM via mounting a VM image to a host directly from a backup file.

-         File-Level Recovery: 

      Restore only specific VM files.

-       Virtual Drive Restore: 

     A specific VM hard drive recovery.

-          Application Item Recovery: 

     Granular recovery of items from Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Active Directory, Microsoft SQL Server etc.

Optimization:

Veeam Backup & Replication decreases backup files size and data traffic with built-in data deduplication and compression. It also provides built-in WAN acceleration to reduce the bandwidth required for transferring backups and replicas over the WAN.

 In Summary

Veeam Backup & Replication is a powerful tool for protection and has been trusted for years. It provides easy solutions for backup disaster recovery solution with a very low response time.

Stonefly Backup Solution for a Seamless Backup of Your Data

Businesses today are growing rapidly with the loads of carrying data which becomes unmanageable sometimes. With businesses growing at a faster pace, there comes more challenges for maintaining complex data at better cost and security. That is why, having a seamless backup solution can save your day. IDC predicts that collective world’s data will grow from 33 zeta bytes to 175 zeta bytes by 2025, for a compounded annual growth rate of 61%.  Because of challenges like these of ever increasing data, businesses look for an all-rounder solution for storage and data backup. They always prefer such solutions with a singly centralized system for leveraging data to enhance business and gain customers’ satisfaction

Fortunately, StoneFly while partnering with Veeam and Microsoft for backup and data recovery gives ultimate solution for all your data protection needs. It consolidates all your storage, server and backup systems into one easy to manage platform for performing backup operations. You can use           veeam cloud appliance according to your needs. 

Why choosing StoneFly Veeam backup will protect your data?

One hour of downtime can cost millions of dollars to your business. StoneFly, Veeam with Microsoft Azure partnered backup gives complete data protection. It gives enterprise level data security while investing $1 billion annually in cyber security research and development. With Azure and combination of StoneFly and Veeam, businesses can have industry compliant backup solutions.

All applications and data is kept protected with advanced data encryption technologies both at rest and at transit. The enterprise grade end to end encryption builds a secure connection between remote offices and sites along with having data backup.

All time data availability with StoneFly backup:

The point is having a backup solution only is of no good use unless it is readily available in times of need. Companies have learned this lesson the hard way that having a backup only is not enough. Their backup solutions should make them to remain operational during downtimes. A single unplanned downtime can cost SMB an average of $256,000.

Thanks to StoneFly backup solution with Veeam and Microsoft Azure. With a simplified and automated backup solution, StoneFly, Veeam and Azure ensures 24/7 data availability. This automated backup solution makes sure your data is all time available while minimizing downtime during a disaster.

Cost friendly option for any file size data backup:

StoneFly does not restrict its customers to how much data they can store. This size limitation is decided by its customers. They can scale up as needed without worrying about capacity. Along with this, it keeps things simpler by offering a flat rate for storage on per TeraByte (TB) basis. With no permanent contract, buy backup plan as you need it.

Businesses need to have cutting edge backup solution for complete data backup and recovery. Users can benefit from StoneFly Veeam backup solution with advanced cloud backup that delivers unprecedented backup with optimal cost. For businesses looking for a reliable, reduced RTOs and RPOs, StoneFly Veeam cloud connect to Azure makes it happen for them.