Do all you can to prevent a cyberattack – but also be prepared to recover data if an attack occurs.
The theme of Cybersecurity Awareness Month, October 2022, is “See Yourself in Cyber.” It encompasses encouraging individuals to adopt cybersecurity best practices, urging people planning their careers to consider cybersecurity, and building private-public partnerships to protect critical infrastructure. However, what’s not explicit in the announcement from The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) about cybersecurity awareness – but is still crucial to every security strategy – is data backup and recoverability.
Storage Media Makes a Difference
Brian Dunagan, Vice President of Engineering at Retrospect, a StorCentric Company, says, “CyberSecurity Awareness Month is a great reminder that we must remain vigilant and always be thinking about how to handle the next wave of cyberattacks.”
Unbreakable Backups
Backing up is key, but it’s also vital to protect backups and replicas. Surya Varanasi, CTO of StorCentric, says, “Today, the process of backing up has become highly automated. But now, as ransomware and other malware attacks continue to increase in severity and sophistication, we understand that proper cyber hygiene must include protecting backed-up data by making it immutable and eliminating any way that data can be deleted or corrupted.”
An ”unbreakable backup” uses an object-locked format and increases security by storing administrative keys in a separate location. Varanasi says unbreakable backups should include policy-driven data integrity checks “that can scrub the data for faults and auto-heal without any user intervention.”