Data Backup

If you are looking to kick-off 2024 strongly, make sure that your solutions have these features we recommend. Safeguard your growth by truly understanding what your future solution should look like. The following are the six anatomy backup features to look for in 2024. Must Have Features in Backup 1. Ransomware Protection Ransomware has been a popular word all over the last couple of years. Suddenly you find your data getting encrypted and you rush down to isolate it from the rest of your network. Someone asks for a ransom but very few get the data back. Even after paying the ransom. A lot of enterprises are satisfied considering their Anti Virus is a good protection but that is not necessarily true. A lot relies on the backup copies that you make for your data as the primary corrupted/encrypted data is generally not recoverable. In a very basic protection plan, backups are the most important aspect. However, many of you face challenges with your backups as well. Hackers have been able to hack your backup repositories too and get them corrupted. So, how can you rely on backups? Cloud backup helps you a lot in this basic level of protection as backed-up data moves out of your own network so, even if your own network is infected you still get protection. In one of the cases, the cloud backups of our enterprise customer suddenly started taking heavier loads. There was more data to back up and it seemed that no deduplication or compression was working on it. Thanks to our 24×7 monitoring, we analyzed and found that these are some new files with a unique extension. We immediately blocked the backup and alerted the IT administrators. It was through this mechanism that the IT realized they have been attacked and their files have been encrypted. Backup indirectly helped to detect encrypted files. We formatted the server and recovered the older version of files to get it operational quickly. The encrypted copies stayed isolated from the real data. This works well, especially on cloud backups that create new files and are unable to back them up. The enterprise was also using a traditional virtual tape library-based backup which just quickly dumped the encrypted files and backed them up successfully. The corrupted version of backups was immediately deleted but continued to carry the risk of corrupting other versions of backups available on the same network. We have been able to help you recover the last good copy of your files both in the case of file servers and MS SQL databases without the need to pay a ransom. To be able to recover quickly from an attack through backups, two key things should be kept in mind: Yes, it is very important that the recovered backups do not re-introduce the malware back into the production data. Attackers silently place an attack loop in the file system. They leave it there for it to get activated on a particular date. When you restore the backups, you end up restoring the attack look agent as well. One of the key things to watch for in your backups in the year 2024 is protection against the ransomware attack loop. Your backup application should be scanning through the packets being backed up & packets being restored. It should be able to detect & isolate malicious code and alert the administrators of infection. Before the actual restoration, legacy recovery files are scanned again to prevent the Attack Loop. The other important things to consider while backing up include: Be careful while using your data backup solution & deployment strategies. Backups are going to help you recover from ransomware issues, so they need to be configured to perform the same. Check out our post on 8 ways to prevent ransomware from damaging your business Seven years back not many agreed on the importance of backing up your Salesforce data. We moved ahead and integrated backing up Salesforce along with other SaaS application data including Office 365 & Google Suite. For a long, Enterprises thought these are not required features, these are only good to have features. This was because of the very slow adoption of Cloud SaaS provider applications. It has taken a while for enterprises to realize the benefits of using these SaaS applications. On top of it, many believe that the data stored on the SaaS platform is always safe which is not true. There have been continuous debates on the possibility of data loss owing to the level of high availability provided by all the cloud service providers. You don’t want to imagine equipment or a DC failure at that level. However, it is important to understand that accidental deletions due to user behavior cannot be ignored. For all mailing applications, 14 to 30 days is the time period till the deleted mail is recoverable. What about going beyond that? For file data also, they allow you to enable versioning. However, you may still need to produce a file with a one-year-old version as per the compliance needs so how do you handle that and how many versions do you plan for these? Therefore it is very important to consider backing up this data. Your backup application must be ready for backing up cloud-based applications like Google Apps, Office365, etc. The application should work within the respective service provider environment and send data to a different environment preferably a different provider to be additionally safe. Not all backup applications support backing up cloud applications. Some of them have limited support like backing up O365 mails but not Sharepoint & OneDrive. Be careful and prepared for this. With the ease of handling data offered by Cloud Service Providers, you would start using them soon so be ready. Also, don’t consider your files on a service provider app as a backup to your on-premise data. Use them for what they are meant to be to get the real use of them. 2. Compilances There is a