Imagine your IT organization as a ship sailing the seas. Equipped with a sturdy hull, a reliable power source, and a skilled crew, you’re ready to handle any potential threats that appear during your ocean voyage. However, massive waves from an incoming storm unexpectedly hit, which destroys your ship and sweeps away everything onboard. Despite team’s intense preparation, your vessel and its crew are caught off guard for this specific disaster, leaving survival uncertain.

Although rarer than it once was, the above scenario mirrors the potential impact of a ransomware attack on your business. You may have a strong IT infrastructure to streamline many business challenges, but what if a hidden ransomware attack wipes out your data, tools, and accessibility? This happens to businesses of all sizes daily, costing millions of dollars and damaging brand reputations. As a last form or protection, IT leaders are turning to backup solutions that protect businesses from cyber threats. In this blog post, we discuss the features of a reputable backup service to ensure full-time cyber-resiliency.

Cyber Attacks Looming Ahead

Ransomware attacks are on the rise. It’s not just costly, but also jeopardizes business continuity, affect customer satisfaction, and expose you to legal and regulatory risks. found that 85% of organizations faced at least once such occurrence in 2023, and most of them more than once. Almost half of these organizations’ data was lost, so they had to restore it from valuable backups. Talk about the importance of this last resort! 

However, cybercriminals genuinely want to make sure you pay the ransom. This is why they go , even before they delete or encrypt your files or infect an organization’s network. The key to hitting your cybersecurity goals is having a reliable backup solution in place to keep business data safe. Let’s explore. 

Mastering Cyber-Resilience With A Backup Solution

Various backup solutions are available in the market with WEI being familiar with many reputable platforms. When selecting one to augment your ransomware and overall cybersecurity posture, the key features to look for in a meaningful backup solution include:

• Data Security: Ensure the chosen backup solution employs encryption for data at rest and in transit. It should also have measures in place to prevent unauthorized access or modifications.
• Malware Detection: The backup solution should include a feature capable of scanning your data for potential threats. Immediate alerts should be provided for any suspicious activity or infections.
• Automated Recovery: Look for a backup solution that facilitates quick and easy data restoration, minimizing downtime and data loss through automated recovery processes.
• Hybrid Cloud Capabilities: Opt for a backup solution that supports various environments, including on-premises, cloud, or hybrid setups. This flexibility allows seamless backup and restoration of data across different platforms.

The effectiveness of a cyber-resilience strategy lies in choosing a robust backup solution, and stands out as one of the industry’s top choices.

What Veeam Brings To The Table

The latest introduces a new layer of security and ransomware protection for enterprises. It addresses concerns on data security, malware detection, automated recovery, and hybrid cloud capabilities.

Veeam offers the flexibility to backup and restore data across different environments, and . You can use Veeam to back up object storage data to any desired location. This gives more flexibility and control over your strategy and protects data from disasters, corruption, or ransomware attacks.

The empowers organizations to:

1. Be Vigilant: The backup process uses an AI-powered built-in malware detection engine to detect and identify cyber threats. This new feature enables your team to perform proactive threat hunting, as backup anomalies are instantly reported in your SIEM tools and . If needed, reach out for a second opinion from your trusted SIEM tool before you recover, using the new . This API allows your SIEM tool to mark recovery points as clean, infected, or suspicious.
2. Be Protected: The Veeam Data platform update 23H2 enables advanced for secure data storage and transfer. This way, only you can decrypt your data, even if stolen. You can also make your backups immutable, even by ransomware, to restore your data from a safe backup during an attack. Furthermore, disconnect backups from the network and limit access only to  authorized users to prevent ransomware from reaching and compromising your backups.
3. Be Resilient: technology helps you minimize downtime and data loss. Whether your environment is on-premises, cloud, or hybrid, you have the luxury of choosing the best recovery method for your data – from granular to full – and restore operations from any point in time.

The presents a responsive suite of data security features to prepare organizations for worst-case scenarios, including the ransomware.

Final Thoughts

As a billion dollar industry, ransomware attacks cause devastating consequences for enterprise data and operations. To protect against such threats, organizations require a flexible and resilient backup solution. Veeam’s latest Data Protection update is a reliable security platform that provides a comprehensive solution to combat ransomware.

With Veeam, you can face a sea of cyber challenges with confidence. Contact us today to learn how we can help you implement Veeam’s Data Protection solution.

Next Steps: Download our tech brief titled It dives into the five steps required for a proactive and secure backup strategy.

The post Three Benefits Of Veeam’s Data Protection Update To Your Cybersecurity Strategy appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.

In the fast-moving world of data security, a resilient and dependable backup solution is an absolute necessity. For more than a decade, and Veeam have teamed up to offer top-notch products that communicate seamlessly together. The two have harnessed their expertise to combine their highly differentiated products into scalable and cost-effective backup solutions, thus enabling enterprises to achieve the performance and efficiency needed to realize their backup, recovery, and disaster recovery (DR) goals.

What exactly makes this partnership so unique? We explore how solution has revolutionized data backup, recovery, and disaster recovery.

ExaGrid And Veeam: A Symbiotic Relationship

ExaGrid’s appliances are designed to work seamlessly with Veeam’s Data Mover, thanks to the ExaGrid-Veeam Accelerated Data Mover. This integration adds a range of advanced features, including:

• Sure Backup
• Virtual Lab
• Instant Virtual Machine (VM) Recovery
• Data Replication And Copying

This combination of features and teamwork between the two partners sets them apart in the competitive world of backup solutions in several ways:

1. Decreased Long-Term Retention Costs

The , when used in tandem with the Veeam Availability Suite, provides a powerful solution for businesses to significantly cut their costs. This combination is renowned for its ability to deliver the industry’s fastest backups and restores, reducing these processes from minutes to mere seconds.

Combining Veeam backups with ExaGrid’s Landing Zone, the ExaGrid-Veeam Accelerated Data Mover and ExaGrid’s support of Veeam Scale-Out Backup Repositories (SOBR) significantly optimizes data management. This means ExaGrid leverages Veeam deduplication and dedupe-friendly compression to achieve faster data restores and virtual machine boots. This process reduces the deduplication ratio from 2:1 to an impressive 14:1, resulting in substantial storage and cost savings for long-term retention.

Furthermore, this solution features a scalable storage system that can seamlessly grow alongside your expanding data needs. This empowers businesses to efficiently manage data and avoid excessive storage costs.

2. Fast Backup And Recovery

Speed is of the essence when it comes to data backup and recovery. With Veeam-to-Veeam communication, data is moved and restored 30% faster than other methods. Even the process of starting virtual machines takes seconds to a few minutes at most.

Additionally, with the release of , the Veeam Fast Clone feature is now running 30 times faster than the previous version. Its capability to perform synthetic full backups on ExaGrid appliances is an innovative advancement.

This means that when you need to resynthesize synthetic full backups into ExaGrid’s Landing Zone, the process is now incredibly fast. This translates to having the quickest data restores and virtual machine boots in the entire industry.

3. Scalability And Cloud-Readiness

The growing volume of data we produce poses a significant challenge for companies struggling to maintain an efficient data backup system. However, the ExaGrid-Veeam solution provides a solution to this problem with future-proof scalability. In other words, as your data grows, your backup system won’t be left behind.

The beauty of this scalability is its simplicity. When your data expands, just add another ExaGrid appliance to your setup to make more storage space. This way, your backup system can smoothly handle your growing data needs without any trouble or complex adjustments.

4. Comprehensive Security And Ransomware Protection

ExaGrid and Veeam understand that keeping your data safe is a top priority. They’ve put in place a viable architecture to protect your information. This system includes various important features, such as:

• Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): Only the people who should have access to your data can get to it.
• Two-Factor Authentication: Now, it will be extra hard for anyone to access your data without your permission.
• Secure HTTPS And TLS Certificates: This feature keeps your data safe during transmission.
• IP-Based Whitelists: With this option, only trusted devices are allowed to connect to network.
• Extensive Monitoring: This ensures your data is consistently protected on all your devices.
• Self-Encrypting Drives And WAN Encryption: This extra layer of security provides added layers of protection. Think of it like putting another lock on the door to your data.

This combination of security measures makes the ExaGrid-Veeam solution a robust defense against potential threats, like ransomware.

Final Thoughts

ExaGrid and Veeam’s extensive partnership offers a top-tier backup solution that’s three times faster than competitors. It includes maintenance, support, and serviceability without hidden costs, unifying premier products and IT architectures seamlessly.

If data management and protection is part of your business strategy, contact WEI to kickstart your data and disaster recovery journey. It’s time to elevate your data protection with tiered backup storage for improved performance, cost efficiency, and scalability.

Next Steps: Download our tech brief titled It dives into the five steps required for a proactive and secure backup strategy.

The post Four Ways Veeam and ExaGrid Support Your Data Protection and Backup Strategy appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.

Your household provides comfort and peace of mind because everything you need is in one place. To safeguard assets and sense of well-being, some of us may have installed a security system – whether it be locked gates, cameras, or smart locks. However, you noticed there’s been a rise in break-ins and burglaries in your neighborhood. Unfortunately, criminals are growing bolder and more skilled, which means bolstering your own security and safety measures.

Now think of data as the valuable possessions inside your home, and the security system as data protection measures. In a similar way that home burglaries are getting more frequent, there has been a surge in data-related disruptions and threats in recent years. Like burglars, cybercriminals have evolved sophisticated techniques, such as ransomware and malware, which pose a significant risk to your data security.

The Challenge With Data Security

These days, data is spread across various platforms in the digital environment, ranging from edge to cloud. This dispersion poses a challenge comparable to safeguarding valuables hidden in different rooms or spots within your home.

Businesses encounter this challenge with cybersecurity: how to secure data across diverse environments and ensure seamless integration. IT and security teams must adapt to new threats and safeguard data wherever it resides. Often, a CISO is overseeing an environment comprised of legacy security technology that operates independently from other elements within the environment’s surface area, leading to major inefficiencies and increased blind spots, especially with cloud adoption as popular as it is.

Meet Your Ideal Data Security Solution

Just like apps that consolidate home security monitoring, plays that same role for businesses. Providing a comprehensive data protection solution from edge to cloud, this solution ensures the following:

1. Integrated security measures into your enterprise’s system architecture. HPE GreenLake for Data Protection conducts data risk assessments, identifying and addressing cybersecurity gaps beyond firewalls. It helps unify data security efforts for consistent practices across your business’s IT landscape.
Additionally, HPE’s provide expertise to automate and scale your data security journey without unnecessary complexity or cost through:

• Streamlining operations and reducing risk with a single console for on-premises virtual machines and cloud-native workloads.
• Protecting your data from ransomware with rapid recovery through a fully orchestrated failover and failback solution within seconds.

2. Resilient cloud-based options for continuous data protection. HPE GreenLake for Data Protection provides a simple, strong, and seamless cloud experience to tackle cyber threats and data growth by transforming traditional storage into cloud-native data services.

The key benefits of HPE’s continuous and secure data protection include:

• Comprehensive enterprise data protection from edge to cloud, globally.
• Encrypted backups that safeguard data from various cyberattacks, including ransomware.
• Support for long-term data retention, mobility, immutable backups, and data resilience testing.
• Enhanced cybersecurity awareness, cloud security, data protection, risk assessment, and threat identification.

By entrusting HPE experts with the task of safeguarding your enterprise data, you gain a smart and cost-effective solution to protect your data.

3. Quick backup and data recovery. While no cybersecurity plan guarantees absolute immunity, HPE offers specialized services for avoiding and recovering from ransomware and malware incidents within minutes.

• Disaster Recovery with : Powered by , this collaboration enables rapid recovery from attacks and restores data to its pre-attack state within minutes. Moreover, it also supports data and workload migration and backup and recovery for various workloads, including on-premises, cloud-native, and SaaS environments.
• : This service provides continuous, encrypted data backup with precise granularity, ensuring fast and effective recovery. With this level of protection, recovery from attacks that threaten data deletion or modification can be comprehensive.

4. Scalability and cost-efficiency to deliver uninterrupted operations. HPE’s portfolio of complements your existing data security program without replacing it, providing broad-spectrum security. This integration offers:

• Operational efficiency through automation and a , providing an affordable disaster recovery solution.
• for ransomware prevention, quick data recovery, and long-term data retention while eliminating complexity and hardware overprovisioning.
• Guaranteed data integrity and availability across locations and hosting platforms.

HPE GreenLake’s portfolio of cybersecurity services provides consolidated protection across multi-site deployments without adding complexity to your infrastructure.

Final Thoughts

Just as you secure your valuable home assets from burglars and unwanted visitors, your data also needs protection. HPE GreenLake for Data Protection provides scalable, continuous, and secure solutions to boost your data security strategy at any stage of your enterprise’s cybersecurity journey.

It’s time to act to secure your data against global threats and maintain operational continuity. Contact our security experts at WEI for a comprehensive data protection assessment and explore HPE’s solutions for today’s edge-to-cloud world.

Next steps: Click below to read HPE GreenLake Provides The Full Spectrum of HPE Solutions.

The post Strengthen Your Data Security with HPE GreenLake for Data Protection appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.

says that 64% of IT leaders cite improved data security for their organization as their top objective over the next 12 months. And for good reason. As technology continues to evolve, it’s not a matter of if an enterprise will have a ransomware attack but when it will happen. With technological advances, it’s not just enterprises that benefit, cyber criminals do as well.

Because of this assumed risk, it is not enough to only have the right technology in place; your enterprise must have a tried and true disaster recovery (DR) strategy laid out ahead of time. complements industry best practices to provide your enterprise with the strategy and technology it needs to safeguard against ransomware attacks that are costly to your data and public reputation.

Five Ransomware Best Practices

When putting together your enterprise’s disaster recovery strategy, here are the five best practices to protect against ransomware.

1. Identify: Determine what environments exist, the risks associated with those environments, and how they impact your enterprise.
2. Protect: Understand what you’re protecting your enterprise against so you can develop appropriate safeguards and contain the impact of potential ransomware attacks.
3. Detect: Accurately and efficiently identifying ransomware will help ensure your team creates an effective and timely action plan.
4. Respond: Develop and implement actions to take in a detected cybersecurity incident. The faster and more effectively you respond to a threat, the faster you can stop it in its tracks, mitigate its damage, and reduce any potential financial impact.
5. Recover: In the event of an attack, timely recovery to normal operations reduces the impact on the enterprise. Make sure you maintain plans for resilience and restore any impaired capabilities or services due to a

Your Enterprise Disaster Recovery Strategy

Your enterprise’s disaster recovery strategies must be thoroughly documented and tested to ensure their effectiveness. This is something Veeam Disaster Recovery Orchestrator does automatically. With this tool, your mission-critical workloads with near-zero recovery point objectives (RPOs) to applications that have been neglected due to a lack of resources can be included in an automated disaster recovery process.

By deploying DR Orchestrator as part of your enterprise disaster recovery plan, your cybersecurity team will have the improved ability to:

• Reduce Risk. DR Orchestrator is a simple, powerful tool that has proven its ability to manage a disaster recovery plan through testing and documenting risks.
• Save Time. Free your IT teams to focus on other mission-critical areas in your enterprise. DR Orchestrator can automate the most time-intensive aspects of disaster recovery planning, such as creating and updating documentation and testing.
• Restore Confidently. From a single app to an entire site, with DR Orchestrator, you can meet RPO and recovery time objective requirements with one-click failover, failback, and restores.

Veeam’s DR Orchestrator Capabilities

DR Orchestrator’s robust feature set reduces risk, saves downtime, and restores data with:

1. Automatic documentation. Generate and create dynamic disaster recovery documentation to prove readiness and compliance.
2. Automated testing. With zero-impact disaster recovery tests, scheduled or on demand, you ensure required recovery time objectives and RPOs can be met.
3. Application verification. After a recovery event, common enterprise applications are examined to verify they are running as expected.
4. Role-based access control. You control the level of access app owners and operations teams have.
5. Instant test lab. With the instant test lab, you can utilize disaster recovery resources for patch testing or anything else without impacting production.
6. Wizard-driven planning. Quickly build comprehensive disaster recovery strategy plans for apps and sites that are automatically updated and verified.
7. One-click recovery. With just one click, you can recover single apps or an entire site from anywhere.

Put Veeam DR Orchestrator To Work For Your Enterprise

With comprehensive support for enterprise applications and infrastructure, Veeam DR Orchestrator can take your disaster recovery strategy to the next level with its robust suite of features. WEI will help you through the process and create a customized solution to protect your enterprise against ransomware. Contact WEI today to get started.

Next Steps: Download our NEW tech brief titled It further explains the 5 mentioned steps for a proactive and secure backup strategy.

The post Is Your Disaster Recovery Strategy Next Level? appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.

What is your enterprise’s cybersecurity process when it comes to ransomware preparedness? As a heavily relied upon technology leader, this is a critical question to ask yourself. Remember, there are two types of companies – those that have been hit with ransomware and those that eventually will be. According to numbers recently published by a ransomware attack occurs every 11 seconds. On average, each incident costs an astounding $700,000 in damages.

Ransomware criminals are constantly deploying attacks on company data that resides in backup storage. That’s why it is prudent to always solidify your enterprise’s ransomware backup protection strategy. A ransomware cyberattack can be even more devastating if the backup storage is eliminated prior to the main attack. Of course, even if your backup system can withstand the early assault, the process of restoring entire data repositories and virtual server farms is time consuming and expensive. It’s easy to see why ransomware is such a major disruptor to the operations of any organization.

The key to ransomware preparedness doesn’t mean purchasing and deploying an array of best-of-breed cybersecurity tools. But these tools alone won’t protect your enterprise – you need to establish a proactive ransomware defense strategy to prevent an intrusion. Transitioning to that posture requires an organizational framework that outlines the best practices and standards to manage ransomware preparedness. This framework is applicable to all levels of an enterprise as well as all points in its supply chain.

Combat Your Risks with Ransomware Preparedness Framework

Every company has unique risks, and they must contend with a diverse number of threats and vulnerabilities. But to defend against ransomware, all companies must start with identifying their risks. Where do those risks currently exist? What are the attack avenues that those enterprise cybersecurity threats will most likely use to infiltrate your organization? Many of these risks are contingent upon the company’s business drivers and security considerations specific to its use of technology. The end goal is not to eliminate all levels of risk to the organization, but to mitigate it. Just as no two organizations face the same levels of risk, the process to mitigate those risks will also vary from company to company. There is no secret recipe, no magic pill – and that’s where the ransomware preparedness framework comes in. One of the more popular options is NIST Cybersecurity Framework. This framework by the was designed to assist organizations through a five-step process:

1. Describe their current cybersecurity posture.
2. Describe their target state for cybersecurity.
3. Identify and prioritize opportunities for improvement within the context of a continuous and repeatable process.
4. Assess progress toward the target state.
5. Communicate among internal and external stakeholders about cybersecurity risk.

Creating the Necessary Cybersecurity Posture for Ransomware Preparedness

Sadly, most organizations operate with passive security posture. Risk is managed in an ad-hoc manner and there is limited awareness of cybersecurity risk across the enterprise. Security initiatives take place on a case-by-case basis and cybersecurity information is seldom shared within the organization. Meanwhile, ransomware attackers often execute a strategy defined by being proactive against such passive organizations. Often, they infiltrate the network of a target organization weeks or months in advance to perform reconnaissance to strengthen their attack plan. That’s why you need a proactive security posture to combat their efforts. A proactive ransomware defense strategy involves taking the following steps:

• Gain Full Visibility of Your IT Estate: The more you can see, the faster you can react to the incidents that are occurring. With the proliferation of you can no longer rely on signature-based protection. Your enterprise requires next-generation firewalls that can conduct deep scanning across all seven layers of your incoming packets to identify anomalies that vary outside of established baseline trends.
• Take Full Advantage of the Extensive Logging Information: This step is often underutilized by many organizations. Logs can be integrated with intelligence-based analyzers that can initiate alerts and reports on anomalies that exist outside of your established baseline trends.
• Educate Users: This starts at the leadership level. Users must possess the knowledge and skillsets to accurately monitor their environments for cybersecurity risks. Routine trainings for executives and managers can be a positive first step in helping transition to a security-first culture.
• Establish a Recovery Plan: Having a plan in place to instruct the members of a defined team what to do in the case of a cybersecurity incident is critical. This includes tasks such as contacting your cyber insurance company and notifying customers.
• Adapt: Make cybersecurity a repeatable process in which procedures are periodically reviewed, scrutinized, and modified, if necessary.

Accepting a Zero-Trust Environment

Risk is everywhere. The approach where a fortified perimeter separated the trusted inner network from the untrusted external world is now obsolete. Cyber criminals sneak their way into the network through email phishing attacks, USB sticks and remote access solutions, just to name a few. That’s why you can no longer trust any tentacle of your network. As a result, enterprises must now bring their firewalls and security appliances within the internal network to filter and analyze traffic within the network itself.

A zero-trust strategy helps manage risks within the network because it provides the necessary visibility, controls, and processes in a zero-trust world. WEI specializes in ransomware preparedness to protect, detect, and respond. How well your organization carries out those core functions will determine its degree of success against any of the pending threats out there. Let WEI help provide you the knowledge and the tools you need to protect your business. From our team of experienced subject matter experts to our proven array of security solutions, we can help you create a customized ransomware defense strategy and toolset that addresses the unique risks of your organization.

Next Steps: If you want to discover more proven tips and strategies to securing your backup solutions, we have published a fresh whitepaper titled, “The Mandatory Components of an Effective Ransomware Strategy.”

The post How to Posture Your Enterprise for Ransomware Preparedness appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.

There used to be a single test to determine the effectiveness of your data backup strategy. It centered around successfully restoring your data from a backup, and you would rest easy knowing that you would, in theory, recover from a data loss event. It was really that simple. Still, there were some security concerns as you did not want just anyone accessing the backups who might accidently (or inadvertently) delete them. There was also the threat of confiscating a backup tape containing sensitive or valuable data by an imposter. For the most part, the data backup system was out of sight and out of mind for everyone other than the backup administrator.

Ransomware Backup Protection Systems are Now Actively Targeted

Ransomware attacks involve the loss of data, thus giving data backup systems a critical role in the battle against increasingly rampant malware. As you can imagine, the evolving nature of ransomware eventually changed the practice referenced at the start of this article. While some organizations lacked a working backup, those that had implemented and operationalized a proven system were able to elude the extortion payment.

Despite a commitment to implementing adequate backup strategies, many company leaders still consider paying the ransom. The decision to do so involves more than simply regaining access to a company’s data. Often, it is looked at as a business decision in which the opportunity cost of spending days or even weeks rebuilding virtual data stores and recovering data directories can exceed the ransom itself. While government authorities continue to discourage paying the ransom, the opportunity to recover quickly often makes practical business sense.

As you can imagine, it didn’t take long for ransomware gangs to learn that a data backup can often be the one thing holding them back from a handsome payday. That’s why backup systems have a prominent bullseye on them now. Take out the backups, and the odds are in favor of the attackers. But if your cyber security team holds the line of attack against your backups, the odds are suddenly back in your favor. That’s also where your ransomware backup protection strategy plays such a pivotal role.

While there are still plenty of threats out there involving less sophisticated attackers who look for easy prey and quick payouts using Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) applications, the large-scale ransomware attacks we read about in the headlines every week are carried about by highly experienced hackers using well-coordinated attack strategies. It is these high-caliber ransomware organizations that you must prepare for.

Ransomware Attacks are Performed in Stages

Infiltrating your network is only the first step of a multipronged ransomware attack. Attackers now spend weeks or even months silently observing your systems to not only find where your data resides, but to also discover how it is protected. Unnerving, isn’t it? It is during this undetected period of observation that the attackers decide how to best eliminate your data backup system.

You may be surprised to know that these ransomware groups are more familiar with the popular backup systems on the market than the customers that use them. It’s in the best interest of the attacker to understand how to eliminate your backups, whether that means deleting, corrupting, or adjusting them. Once your backups are eliminated, the next target is your virtual infrastructure, which they intend to destroy as well. After they shut down your servers, they begin the process of encrypting your data stores. For VMware environments, the objective is then to destroy the vCenter and encrypt the VMware data stores. They use similar strategies to take down Hyper-V or Nutanix architectures as well.

Follow Recommended Cybersecurity Practices for Enhanced Ransomware Backup Protection

Properly securing your backups starts with implementing the best security standards. While air gapping is often discussed, do you know what that strategy entails? As a backup/recovery expert, I serve as WEI’s solutions architect. I regularly conduct workshops throughout the year, and recently discussed the many challenges at hand and how to prepare for them. I also identified prominent mistakes that we continue to find in real world environments.

Here are some of the top mistakes that internal cybersecurity professionals make all too often. While my discussion exclusively involved Veeam solutions, these mistakes also apply to other backup platforms:

1. Remoting into the server that hosts your backup solution: Never RDP into your backup server as these sessions can easily be compromised. Instead, use the backup system’s remote console software so that you are not logging onto the actual server.
2. Joining your backup system to Microsoft Active Directory: Besides targeting your backup system, hackers are diligently working to crack your AD. Once compromised, they can get access to privileged accounts with administrator rights to your backups.
3. Installing your backup software on a virtual server: One of the primary purposes of Veeam is to back up your VMs. If the hackers take out your virtual infrastructure, your backup system is gone, too. Consider using a physical server to host your backup solution whenever possible.
4. Only relying on passwords to protect log-on processes: Many organizations use multifactor authentication to secure their O365 logons, yet solely rely on password authentication to protect their backup logons. Sometimes this is due to the outdated attitude of “it’s only the backup server.” In this new era of ransomware, the backup server is one of the most important systems in your security arsenal. It is no longer “just the backup server.”
5. Leaving the local firewall disabled because they are unsure of what ports the hosted backup solution requires: They disable the firewall to install the new backup solution with the intention of properly configuring it at a later point. This leaves a wide-open opportunity for attack avenues that hackers easily take advantage of. Take care of your firewall configurations immediately!

Win Each Malware Battle with Robust Ransomware Backup Protection

Ransomware is a war, but it is a winnable war if you have the correct enterprise cybersecurity strategies in place. Within this war, there are battles you don’t have to fight alone as WEI’s team of backup and cybersecurity specialists can help outline a ransomware backup protection plan that fits your particular risk environment and budget. You may contact our experts at your convenience.

Next Steps: If you want to discover more proven tips and strategies to securing your backup solutions, we have published a fresh whitepaper titled, ““

The post Solidify Your Ransomware Backup Protection Strategy appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.