Backing up your data isn’t a new practice. In fact, it has been around for decades protecting users from losing their data to viruses, hard drive crashes, and more. This an issue most people have experienced at least once in their lives.
Did you know that there are an estimated 140,000 hard drive crashes each week in the US? In addition, it is also expected that around 20% of small and midsize businesses experience data loss due to a major disaster. These figures help to evidence why data backup is so crucial and explain why the cloud backup market has become so essential for businesses in recent years.
As cloud storage services became popularised, a new problem arose. Backing up your data was no longer enough, it also needed to be protected. Morphing data backup into data protection.
What does data protection mean?
In simple terms, it means that data backups require cybersecurity. Whilst cloud-based backups offer the benefits of convenience and easy accessibility since they exist as an online backup, they are susceptible to a number of threats.
Known threats that pose a risk to data backups include:
- Data centre outage: “The cloud” is just a fancy way of saying your data exists on a server in a data centre somewhere. And just like any other server, they can crash and experience outages.
- Sleeper ransomware: This advances ransomware is silent when it infects a device. Only once it has infected all your backups is it activated, leaving victims without a backup to restore to.
- Misconfiguration: Whilst security can keep your data safe from a lot of threats if it isn’t set up correctly, it can also create problems. Misconfigured security settings can enable attackers to access your cloud storage and download or delete files as they like.
What to Look for in a Data Protection Backup System
Simply backing up your data isn’t enough anymore. In order to protect your sensitive data, you need to make sure that the application you use to back up your data offers sufficient data protection measures too. Here are some essential features to look out for when reviewing backup solutions:
Ransomware prevention
Once a device has been infected with ransomware, it can spread throughout a network corrupting any data it comes in contact with whether that’s data on computers, servers, or mobile devices.
Furthermore, with 95% of ransomware attacks leading to an attempt to infect data backup systems, ransomware protection is vital to your data protection.
Continuous Data Protection
An upgrade from traditional backup solutions that operate on a schedule, such as once per day, continuous data protection backs up files as users make changes. This feature has become increasingly popular in today’s environment when losing a day’s worth of data can be very costly.
Threat Identification
Threat identification is a preventative tool that proactively looks for threats in new and existing backups. This helps to prevent malware, viruses and ransomware from infecting your backups.
Zero-Trust Tactics
Whilst there are a handful of zero-trust tactics, they all have a common theme of requiring ongoing authentication. This ensures that only the correct people can access your data. Examples of zero-trust features include:
- Multi-factor authentication
- Distinct file and folder permissions
- Contextual authentication
- Verification of permissions for file changes
Backup Redundancy
Backup redundancy is a means of protecting your data in the event of a server crash, natural disaster, or cyberattack. By storing a copy of your data backup in an additional location or server backup, your data won’t be lost if the original backup is corrupted or lost.
At Gemini, we work in partnership with key industry suppliers to provide business backup and file encryption software to our customers in Carlisle, Dumfries and further afield.