Dorian Shows Why Cyber Protection is Vital for Disaster Preparedness

For modern organizations, data is the lifeblood of their business: so it’s understandable that, when faced with the recent explosion of cyberthreats like ransomware and cryptojacking, their IT teams have been focused on their cybersecurity posture. After all, successful ransomware attacks have cost businesses billions of dollars, with more than $11.5 billion in damages expected by the end of this year.

Yet the recent footage of Hurricane Dorian shows the devastating power of Mother Nature – and underscores how storms, floods, and fires still threaten a company’s digital assets just as seriously as hackers do.

Whether you’re protecting your own organization’s data or you’re a service provider responsible for multiple customers, backup without cybersecurity is no longer enough. But cybersecurity without backup and disaster recovery isn’t enough either. You must tackle data protection and cybersecurity needs simultaneously – which can be a challenge given today’s shrinking budgets.

A recent IDC whitepaper revealed that the emerging IT discipline of cyber protection – which combines proven data protection and cutting-edge cybersecurity – provides an effective strategy for safeguarding data from any threat, despite today’s complex, costly environment.

When developing a cyber protection strategy that can respond to a natural disaster like Dorian, there are a few recommendations.

Disaster preparedness comes down to organizations ensuring that they can stay in business, avoid costly downtime, and eliminate the risk of reputational damage because they can’t meet customer expectations – even during extreme circumstances. Therefore, when planning their protection, companies should focus on the data required to maintain their daily business operations.

That will vary from one organization to the next, but a business owner might want to ensure they have access to legal documents like contracts and incorporation papers; databases of customer data, inventory, etc.; applications and control systems; employee payroll and health insurance information; and tax information.

Maintaining reliable backups and storing them locally can help with the daily data recovery needs of a business. But when talking about natural disasters, remember that both the original system and local backups can be destroyed.

To prepare for floods, fires, or hurricanes, creating a backup of business-critical data and storing it safely off-site is the only way to ensure the data, applications, and systems can be retrieved once the threat has passed.

Cloud backups make this off-site copy convenient – so recovery point objectives (RPOs) can be as short as possible to minimize potential data gaps. Cloud backups also provide remote access to and recovery of data. That way if a company can’t return to its main office following a natural disaster, they can recover their files and systems to work remotely until things return to normal.

Minimizing the time it takes to recover is critical, especially since IDC’s research indicates the average cost of an hour of downtime is $250,000.

With Acronis Cyber Cloud, service providers can deliver cloud-based disaster recovery services (DRaaS). These allow a company to failover to a copy of its systems that’s running in the cloud – enabling operations to recover within a matter of seconds rather than hours or days.

“Planning for a disaster when a disaster strikes, or is almost upon you, is never a good idea,” observes Mark Jameson, Acronis’ Vice President Strategic Business Development and Global Disaster Recovery. “Best of breed service providers use the power of Acronis Cyber Cloud to enable their clients to have the right plans in place to ensure the safety and accessibility of their IT resources and data before a disaster strikes.” 

Some organizations may choose to maintain their own protection, and Acronis Backup allows them to back up individual files and emails, or create a full image backups – including the operating system (OS), recent updates, all applications, and settings – which makes storing all of this valuable data off-site in the cloud simple.

Ultimately, this means that restoring everything a business needs to keep running is easy and efficient. The organization can re-establish its operations faster, allowing it to retain the trust of its customers and protect its reputation.

All of Acronis’ solutions address the Five Vectors of Cyber Protection, which was described in the IDC whitepaper.

In addition to the Safety and Accessibility provided by local and cloud backups, they include enterprise-grade encryption and control over data location to ensure end-to-end data Privacy. They also include the industry’s only integrated blockchain-based digital notary service, which allows users to certify and verify data Authenticity.  

Of course, each solution delivers modern Security with Acronis Active Protection, an AI-based anti-ransomware defense that detects and stops attacks in real-time, and automatically restores affected files. It successfully prevented more than 400,000 ransomware attacks in 2018 alone.

Acronis Active Protection also detects and stops cryptomining malware attacks. Called cryptojacking, these attacks steal computer resources to illicitly mine for cryptocurrencies – slowing performance, increasing energy costs, potentially overheating the hardware, and often introducing other cyberthreats.

Acronis’ defense is so effective at stopping cryptojacking that an independent testing lab recently revealed Acronis outperformed the vast majority of leading endpoint security solutions – earning Acronis Backup one of only three Triple-A ratings awarded in the study.

Whether it’s a monster storm approaching the coast, tornadoes tearing up town centers, or a zero-day ransomware attack that’s crippling systems around the world, surviving these threats requires planning and preparedness. Thankfully, a comprehensive cyber protection approach is easy, efficient and secure with Acronis solutions, ensuring you can protect all of the data you are responsible for from challenges presented by both the physical and digital world.

Service providers who want to help their customers with the powerful cyber protection services available via the Acronis Cyber Cloud should reach out to their Acronis Account Manager or contact us here.

Want to try Acronis Backup for your business? Take advantage of our free 30-day trial to experience modern cyber protection for yourself.