Introducing Veeam Cybersecurity & Disaster Recovery
In the modern data protection landscape protecting data is as much about ensuring that we are complying with our protection strategies as it is about security. This course is designed to give you a view ‘over the fence’ into security so you are prepared to play a critical role in protecting your organization's data, from both external threats such as external actors looking to compromise systems for ransomware purposes or internal incidents such as actions performed by disgruntled employees, playing your part in the shared responsibility of securing the environment using industry security standards and security best practices.
Having a basic understanding of security is important for a backup administrator for several reasons:
| Protecting Backup Infrastructure | Network security plays a critical role in safeguarding the backup infrastructure from unauthorized access, malicious activities, and potential vulnerabilities. A backup administrator needs to understand network security principles to implement appropriate measures to secure backup servers, storage, and communication channels. |
| Preventing Data Breaches | Backup systems often contain sensitive and valuable data, including intellectual property, customer information, and financial records. Understanding network security helps the backup administrator in implementing the necessary measures to protect this data from unauthorized access or breaches. |
| Mitigating ransomware attacks | Our data shows over 90% of the time threat actors target the backup systems. Ransomware attacks often target backup systems to compromise or delete backups, rendering the organization helpless against data loss. A backup administrator with good security experience can implement strategies like network segmentation, access controls, and intrusion detection systems to reduce the chances of such attacks and protect the integrity of the backup environment. |
| Implementing secure backups | Backing up data over the network introduces potential security risks. Understanding security allows the backup administrator to implement secure backup practices, such as encryption of backup data in transit, establishing secure communication protocols, and implementing immutable backup repositories. |
| Collaborating with IT security teams | Network security is a shared responsibility within an organization. Having a basic understanding of network security allows the backup administrator to collaborate effectively with IT security teams to ensure that backup systems align with overall network security policies and practices. |
| Incident response and recovery | In the event of a security incident or breach, the backup administrator needs to work closely with IT security teams to assess the impact, assist in the investigation, and restore affected systems. Understanding network security helps the backup administrator to contribute effectively to incident response and recovery efforts. |
What challenge faces us?
Unauthorized access either direct or via ransomware is a significant concern when it comes to data security, we need to recognize two things.
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In the event data has been encrypted in a ransomware scenario, our primary method of recovering data without paying a ransom is going to be recovering data from backup files.
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Ransomware operators are more than aware of this (as this is a significant barrier to their payout). This makes backups a primary target of ransomware attacks. In fact, 96% of ransomware attacks target backups.
According to our research, 85% of organizations have admitted to having a substantial ransomware incident in 2022. That’s probably not surprising.
But did you know that of the companies who choose to pay the ransom about one third didn’t recover their data? We are talking about criminals after all, so it shouldn’t be a shock that they aren’t trustworthy!
More concerning is that only 19% of those companies were able to recover their data without paying the ransom.
Every one of these companies had some form of disaster recovery plan but they fell short recovering their data because their existing backup solution wasn’t designed to function at the scale of a ransomware attack.