If there’s a risk you could lose it, and it’s important – then you should start thinking about backing it up.
And if you’re backing it up, then you should get it air-gapped as well.
Backups are vital. If your system is hacked or damaged, they may be your business’ only chance of staying afloat.
But what happens if your backups are compromised at the same time?
Our friends at Veeam recently highlighted one of the risks here. Ransomware, which has traditionally targeted files on your servers and workstations, can now target backups as well.
What does that mean? Well, first a quick refresh on ransomware. It’s malware which encrypts your files and prevents access unless you pay a ransom. If you’ve got good backups, that can usually help solve the problem. Rather than unlocking the encrypted files, you can just roll back to a previous backup.
But now, some forms of ransomware delete the backups before encrypting your files. It becomes that much harder to get your files back without paying the ransom.
The solution is air-gapped backups.
Air-gaps: an essential part of your backup process
An air gap is a computer, storage medium or secure network that’s not connected to an external network. You can only access it physically, so it’s not vulnerable to hacking over the internet.
Air-gapping your backups means keeping a physically separate, secure, additional backup. It shouldn’t be accessible via remote access. Ideally, no staff member should have access alone, in case they access them maliciously.
Tape backups are the most straightforward and effective kind of air-gapped backup. Keep them in a safe offsite, completely separate from your other backups, and it becomes all-but-impossible for someone to wipe them all out.
But most third-party cloud and Office 365 providers don’t give you air-gapped backups
The backups are usually just to an offshore, large-scale cloud provider, such as Amazon Web Services or Azure. It’s better than nothing, but it still leaves you vulnerable. Those backups are accessible remotely, which means a hacker could get in there – or a disgruntled employee.
Air gaps are a standard part of our CommArc cloud services
CloudServer, CloudMail, CloudDrive and MailProtect all include archiving to tape as default. The tapes are sent to a secure offsite facility, completely separate from our data centres and offices. Archiving to tape is available as an option for CloudBackup and TotalDR.
Talk with us about your backup options. Because you’re never fully backed-up unless you’re air-gapped.