Why conventional disaster recovery won’t save you from ransomware
The conventional formula for maintaining business continuity in the face of unexpected IT disruptions is as follows: Back up your data. Make a recovery plan. Test the recovery plan periodically.
That approach may work well enough if your primary concern is defending against risks like server failures or data center outages caused by natural disasters. But in the present age of widespread ransomware attacks, conventional backup and recovery planning aren’t always enough.
Enterprises struggle with serious gaps in cyber response plans
A new survey of 1,000 businesses across the UK, UK, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region reveals a worrying disconnect between organizations' perceived readiness and actual performance in cyber crisis response.
The study for Semperis, with research from Censuswide, finds 90 percent of enterprises surveyed struggle with serious blockers to effective cyber response. Top issues include cross-team communication gaps (48 percent), out-of-date response plans (45 percent) and unclear roles and responsibilities (41 percent).
How to maintain contact center operations during a crisis
As the prevalence of natural disasters and cyberattacks increases, it becomes essential that leaders prioritize robust infrastructure. Oftentimes, communications capabilities, including contact centers and customer service support lines, are the most vulnerable during emergencies -- which is exactly when these functions become most necessary.
Well-maintained and protected infrastructure is even more important when you consider the ramifications of an outage. Organizations take 212 days on average to detect a breach and 75 more days to contain it -- that means nearly a year of interrupted operations post-attack. During this time, consumers may be unable to receive critical, even life-saving information.
Why it's critical to have an incident response plan [Q&A]
Recent research carried out by IBM found that organizations with regularly tested incident response plans had a $2.66 million lower data breach cost than organizations without them.
We spoke to Adam Scamihorn, product director at InterVision, to find out why every enterprise needs to have a strong incident response plan in order to face up to growing security threats.
It's not always malware
Every day, cyber incidents and their subsequent downtimes seem to fill the news. These downtimes, both costly and damaging to consumer trust, have rightfully been something that CISOs and CIOs work to prevent with increasingly sophisticated security measures. But sometimes the most damaging "disasters" are the simplest.
Earlier this year, one of the hyperscale suffered a major data center incident in which a water leak triggered a fire in a co-location data center, knocking more than 90 services offline in France. This serves as a reminder to us all that, despite rising cybercrime stealing the headlines, preparing for physical disasters remains a vital part of any disaster recovery (DR) plan. It is crucial that businesses consider the impact that these incidents may create on their own day-to-day operations and invest in their own disaster recovery.
Enterprises change their backup approach to deal with cloud risks
Companies are increasingly recognizing the increasing need to protect their SaaS environments, with almost 90 percent of Microsoft 365 customers now using supplemental measures rather than relying solely on built-in recovery capabilities.
The latest study from data protection specialist Veeam finds 98 percent of organizations use a cloud-hosted infrastructure like Backup-as-a-Service or Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service as part of their data protection strategy.
The business continuity emergency
2021 marked a dramatic step change in global climate conditions, with a significant increase in the incidence and severity of extreme weather events resulting in flooding, hurricanes and heatwaves across the globe. The UK and Europe experienced the hottest summers on record during the past three years. This year’s extreme, record-breaking heatwave in July took the UK climate beyond 40 degrees Celsius, and posed serious threats to UK infrastructure.
This ongoing and accelerating trend is now sadly locked into the Earth’s system for decades to come. In Western Europe, heatwaves are increasing in frequency, at about three times faster, and in intensity, roughly four times faster, than in other midlatitude regions according to a recent study. This is having a knock-on impact for business, as evidenced by July’s West London data center outages for Google and Oracle Cloud and heatwave related IT issues for NHS Trusts. The need for C-suites to consider climate-related events as a serious risk to business continuity can no longer be seen as a problem of the future.
Think your business is ready for ransomware? Think again
Although business leaders think they're fully prepared to deal with ransomware, actual outcomes suggest otherwise, according to a new report.
Druva has commissioned IDC to conduct independent research into ransomware preparedness, challenges, and threats to find out how approaches to ransomware are changing and whether common recovery efforts are effective.
Disaster recovery planning: A successful framework for strategy and execution
The rise in cyber incidents is set to continue on its meteoric trajectory over the next decade. Ransomware attacks on a business, consumer, or a device are anticipated to take place every two seconds by 2031 -- a worrying escalation from every 11 seconds in 2021. And by 2025, damages are projected to reach a staggering $15 trillion annually, up from $3 trillion in 2015, according to Cybersecurity Ventures.
At the same time, users demand better performance and user experience year-after-year, and the subsequently increased threat landscape poses real challenges in connectivity and data security. 'Insider threat' also poses a considerable risk, with 80 percent of breaches involving privileged credentials misuse or abuse and malicious insider activity from recent employees.
SQL Server: Recovering operations after a disaster
Datacenters disappear. Not often, but it happens. Hurricane Sandy in 2012 swallowed whole datacenters in Lower Manhattan. Hurricanes Irma and Maria wiped out virtually all the datacenters in Puerto Rico in 2017. Cloud datacenters are not immune, either. The Azure Central Region outage of 2018 occurred after a lightning strike queued up a sequence of automated responses that failed in a spectacularly Rube Goldberg-like manner and proceeded to take multiple Azure availability zones offline for the better part of a day.
Sometimes it’s possible to anticipate the arrival of a disaster; other times, the disaster arrives without warning. Either way, the production infrastructure your organization depends on is going to be offline for some time. That does not, however, mean that your operations must go offline. It means that you need to have a disaster recovery (DR) plan in place that can provide an alternative means of keeping your operations running when your primary infrastructure is out of commission.
Disaster Recovery Planning: A successful framework for strategy and execution
The rise in cyber incidents is set to continue on its meteoric trajectory over the next decade. Ransomware attacks on a business, consumer, or a device are anticipated to take place every two seconds by 2031 -- a worrying escalation from every 11 seconds in 2021. And by 2025, damages are projected to reach a staggering $15 trillion annually, up from $3 trillion in 2015, according to Cybersecurity Ventures.
At the same time, users demand better performance and user experience year-after-year, and the subsequently increased threat landscape poses real challenges in connectivity and data security. 'Insider threat' also poses a considerable risk, with 80 percent of breaches involving privileged credentials misuse or abuse and malicious insider activity from recent employees.
World Backup Day highlights the importance of keeping your data safe
Today is World Backup Day, which is a good opportunity to remind you that you only have a couple of days left to get your hands on some free backup software courtesy of our AOMEI giveaway.
It's also an opportunity to look at the continued importance of backups even in the modern world of clouds and SaaS applications. A new report from Crucial highlights the ongoing cost of data breaches which has risen 9.8 percent from 2020 to 2021.
Bridging the gap to the C-Suite: Four tips to increase executive buy-in to disaster recovery
When it comes to communicating security concerns and the critical threat that cyberattacks and subsequent data loss pose to business, one of the core challenges that CISOs continue to face is bridging the considerable knowledge gap amongst senior level stakeholders.
Too often, organizations believe they have a comprehensive disaster recovery (DR) plan in place, accounting for and mitigating all potential risks and ensuring sufficient provision for a rapid return to 'business as usual'. But often the risks in terms of interrupted service, loss in revenue, potential supply chain disruption and damage to reputation, are not fully understood.
New software improves ransomware resilience and recovery
Ransomware attacks are growing in severity and volume, bringing increasing costs and financial, legal, and other challenges.
Businesses need to be sure they can recover from an attack and data management specialist Zerto aims to provide the means with its latest offering Zerto 9.
Only 54 percent of businesses have a properly documented disaster plan
A new survey finds that only 54 percent of respondents at US businesses employing 500 or more staff have a documented, company-wide disaster recovery plan in place.
The study from hosting and services provider iland also finds that DR testing frequency is very low. Just 50 percent are testing only annually or at less frequent intervals, while seven percent don't test their DR at all.
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