TALKING
business
‘‘
able to access critical files, productivity will
plummet. Companies without a robust data
protection scheme should look to implement
one as a matter of urgency.
What best practice approach
should organisations take to
data protection?
StorageCraft recommends organisations
assess and test their recovery plans for
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THE MOST SUCCESSFUL
COMPANIES IN THE DIGITAL ECONOMY
WILL BE THOSE THAT IMPLEMENT
STORAGE POLICIES BASED NOT ON
THEIR SERVER HIERARCHY, BUT THE
VALUE OF THEIR DATA.
‘orchestration’ ensures minimal downtime
once data recovery begins.
Immediate recovery: Considering one
minute of downtime costs US$5,600
according to industry analyst firm,
Gartner, the speed of recovery following
a ransomware attack is a crucial element
of the remediation and recovery process.
Solutions such as StorageCraft VirtualBoot
provide the ability to recover virtual and
physical infrastructures – and both structured
and unstructured data – instantly.
Failback: After a successful cloud-based
recovery, the last step in remediating a
ransomware infection is returning the data
infrastructure to its original location and
resuming operations as usual. The planned
failback process should have a minimal
impact on production applications to
minimise any additional downtime and
adverse effect on the business.
ransomware prevention, remediation,
systems failures, any type of natural
disaster, on a regular basis, being once a
year, twice a year, etc. It is the only way to
know whether they can meet their Recovery
Point Objectives (RPO) and Recovery Time
Objectives (RTO).
In the event of a ransomware attack,
businesses should first identify and locate
their business-critical data and take steps to
protect it. This step includes email security
systems, firewalls, regular software updates,
clearly audited administrative and access
policies and user education.
Prevention is not foolproof, which is
why a ransomware-specific plan for
remediation and recovery is essential.
Thwarting ransomware is dependent on an
organisation’s data locality (i.e., on-premises,
in the cloud or in cloud-based applications
such as G Suite and O365) and preferred
recovery location. Critical elements of a
successful plan for ransomware remediation
and recovery include:
Immutable snapshots: To ensure
unstructured data can be recovered,
companies should protect their information
with continuous immutable snapshots. Data
captured this way is ‘frozen’ and cannot
be overwritten or deleted by ransomware
attackers. This ensures an organisation can
revert to a secure set of data.
Orchestration: A successful recovery
process requires that business-critical data
and applications are prioritised. Companies
using cloud-based recovery should predetermine
the order in which their data
and applications will be recovered. This
What are some of the key challenges
organisations face when it comes
to data protection and how can
StorageCraft help to address these?
A recent survey, commissioned by
StorageCraft, discovered that nearly 50%
of IT decision makers are struggling with
data growth and believe it is only going
to get worse. Further to this, 51% are not
confident that their IT infrastructures can
perform instant data recovery in the event
of a failure. It’s clear that exponential data
growth and its safe storage is a challenge for
organisations and an area that businesses
need additional support.
The findings also reveal a concerning
disconnect between an organisation’s
confidence and its actual ability to recover
from a ransomware attack. While 68% of
respondents believe they have a clear plan
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