FEATURE : ENTERPRISE RESILIENCE cooking at home while the cloud is like dining out . This is misleading . It is closer to hiring out a fully equipped kitchen , you should expect the stove to work , and be safe , but if you burn the food , it is up to you .
Data backup and disaster recovery are often shared responsibilities . The cloud provider offers the tools and capabilities , but it is up to the customer to configure and manage backups according to their needs . If you want to offload those responsibilities to a third party , you can do so with Backup-as-a-Service and Platformas-a-service , but they do not come as standard .
Ransomware payments
Ransomware remains the top threat for data breaches and system outages . The Veeam Data Protection Trends Report 2024 found that three out of four organisations suffered at least one ransomware attack last year , with a quarter being attacked more than four times . Recovering from ransomware is an unfortunate reality of modern business , yet far too many organisations end up paying the demands .
Experts in ransomware resilience across the industry have made great efforts to argue against ransomware payments and educate organisations on how data backup and system recovery is a far safer , more reliable , and ethical way to recover from ransomware attacks .
Data backups , system recovery
Mohamad Rizk , Senior Regional Director , Middle East and CIS , Veeam Software
A survey of ransomware victims found that 81 % of organisations paid the ransom while only 54 % were able to recover their data and 27 % could still not recover their data .
However , only some people understand this process , particularly outside of security or IT specialists . A few things can happen after transferring funds into Bitcoin and sending the payment to the attackers . What often happens at first is nothing . Ransomware is not like opening a Netflix account . You do not get seamless , instant access to what you have paid for , you must wait .
In the more unfortunate cases , waiting lasts forever , and no decryption keys are ever supplied . More likely , the keys will eventually be given , but it is worth noting that even this is often in vain . According to the same survey , one in four victims who paid were still left unable to recover their data .
While every organisation takes backup seriously these days , doubly so now regulations such as the EU ’ s NIS2 make it a legal requirement for many , many are less prepared than they think when it comes to using this backup to recover from an event like ransomware .
There are a few common trip-ups when it comes to ransomware attack recovery . The first is the backup being targeted and compromised during the incident .
Attackers can affect backup repositories in three out of four attacks . The way around this ? Have multiple backups and mutable , unchangeable backups , and keep a version offline . Another roadblock organisations run into , is not having an environment ready to recover data . Organisations sometimes do not realise until it is too late that the production environment that houses workloads , whether a cloud or on-premises , is often unavailable for some time . It is either compromised or cordoned off as an active crime scene .
The main misconception around this is not that paying ransoms is risk-free , but how long it takes to recover , even if it does work . It is not point-and-click ; decryption is a manual task , with decryption keys unlocking only a small number of files at once .
You are not unlocking one giant padlock around your warehouse . You are unlocking each thing inside . Some groups will even charge you more for additional keys to make the process faster . It is no wonder that , on average , recovery from a ransomware attack takes just over three weeks .
You need a backup environment to recover your backup data to during an outage . If this is a cloud , make sure your team is technically comfortable with how that specific cloud works , you do not want to be refactoring data or learning new cloud specifications in the middle of an outage .
Ensuring data protection and data resilience is neverending . Widespread misconceptions can make an organisation vulnerable or slower to respond to the business ’ s data protection needs . Knowledge is power , and ignorance is bliss until things start going wrong . p
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