I’ve been following some very disturbing business trends in the news lately and have come to the conclusion that in IT operations, human evil has now surpassed mother nature and even human error for the top spot on the fear and risk list for IT business disasters?
I’m referring to this chart I recently saw. Ransomware attacks are on the top. This is a direct product of human evil – call it extortion, kidnapping, even blackmail – except in this case your IT infrastructure is the hostage.
Note – without a more detailed breakdown – some might argue that power outages should be split out to either natural disaster and human error – as power does not typically just disappear without a reason.
Face it, even with improved prevention and detection methods, ransomware is still the leading fear and cause of business outage today?
What are your choices? Either pay up, give up, or fight back. I don’t like the first two options and neither should you. It’s time to fight back.
What if you could respond to a ransomware attack like this:
“hmm, you’ve locked up (encrypted) all of our important data and systems, and unless we pay you (in bitcoin?) it’s lost forever? I don’t think so. My team has prepared for this day and we have multiple safe copies of our business critical data – yes in immutable backups – that your silly attack could not reach – and they are available in multiple locations that we can bring back online before you receive this response. How about you send us $1M (in bitcoin?) and we won’t bring in the Feds to track down your attempt to extort our business. Too late – that knock on your door is …”
That response could be possible, but only if you could protect (backup, snapshot, replicate, etc) your infrastructure data with ease and efficiency and bring any of those “safe” earlier copies of data back into service in “no time”. I did not say zero time but I’m talking about minutes instead of hours or days to roll back to the right version(s) of non-infected storage. No mechanical data extraction, re-hydration, or fragile format conversions needed.
Your business is back online before you know it. Then you’ll have time to hunt down the criminals if you want.
For further reading on this topic look here.