Understanding the importance of Data Backup

An interview with Rick Vanover, Senior Director of Product Strategy, Dave Russell, Vice President, Enterprise Strategy, Michael Cade, Field CTO, Cloud Native of Veeam, a software company that provides backup, disaster recovery, and data management solutions for virtual, physical, and cloud-based environments, to talk about data backup on World Backup Day.

Question: How important is data backup and what do companies stand to lose when they forego backups? 

Rick Vanover: Backup is only important when a company needs to recover data. This lesson gets learned again and again as the risk of not being able to recover data puts everything at risk. I’d challenge that organizations are generally now digitally transformed and the risk of not being able to recover data puts the entire organization in jeopardy with downtime, costs, loss of business reputation and more. 

Dave Russell: Unfortunately, we have all lost data, in our personal and professional lives. We’ve researched the causes for unplanned server outages from the last three years, and all of the things that we’ve worried about for decades, such as networking issues and accidental deletion, all remain, and now cybersecurity events have become the most common, and the most impactful cause of an outage. If there are no backups to recover from, a company risks loss of revenue and loss of brand and reputation.

Michael Cade: As with all platforms, the protection of data is critical to business. The key area of focus for me though is making people aware and to understand the importance of data backup when it comes to cloud and cloud native. As many businesses are in process of moving their workloads into the public cloud and consuming as a service, it’s important to note that this doesn’t remove the requirement for data management. The cloud providers are going to keep the infrastructure available and resilient, but the data is on you as a company. Now when we get further up the stack to Kubernetes and cloud native adoption, this is just another platform. So, all those data services (regardless of where they reside), if the data is important then backup is needed.

Question: How does ransomware impact organizations when they don’t have their data backed up? 

Rick Vanover: This scenario would be incredibly unfortunate as one can’t recover what hasn’t been backed up. Organizations should prioritize data protection strategies to be complete in what they protect but also reliable in the ability to drive recovery when it is needed most. 

Dave Russell: Our global industry data shows that backup is vital for recovering from a ransomware event, as on average, 39% of data is encrypted or destroyed. No organization, of any size, vertical, or geography has 2 out of 5 files, servers or applications that they can afford to completely lose.

Michael Cade: Ransomware is inevitable. In fact, that risk is only growing according to research. From a data services perspective, there is one particular area that are being targeted by those cyber criminals – gain access to a database exfiltrate customer data, sell that data and then encrypt. Imagine that happening to your business, which is not an if, but when. We are seeing more adoption of PaaS-based database services in the cloud as well as an increase of data services being deployed within Kubernetes. It is imperative that we secure and protect these workloads because an impact isn’t always a light touch when these bad actors strike. Having up front visibility of attacks and having an immutable copy of your data as the last line of defense is going to get you back up and running as a business versus closing the doors to your business.

Question: What trends have you seen with ransomware in the past year and what do you foresee happening this year? 

Rick Vanover: Multi-modal behavior will be a trend moving forward – a ransomware threat that started with a phishing email, leveraged by a remote access implementation that was not fully secured, and then exploited a known (or unknown) vulnerability as part of an organization’s technology stack. Another trend with ransomware still exists on the people side of the equation with businesses that still don’t have a solid plan in place to address a ransomware response when it happens – because it will happen. A third trend with ransomware is actually encouraging – more ultra-resilient media types than ever. In the end, what we want data backup to do is get a business out of a problem. Ransomware will put a data backup strategy to the test and having a copy on an ultra-resilient media is the best way to get out of that problem. Ultra-resilient media types include technologies that are air-gapped, offline, immutable or require 4-eyes recovery (2 humans). There are more ultra-resilient media options than ever and advise businesses to implement the 3-2-1 Rule and refresh it with the 2 non-production copies to *both* be ultra-resilient media types. 

Dave Russell: Ransomware and cyberthreats are evolving. Unfortunately, as an industry, we are losing ground. Veeam’s unbiased, independent industry-wide research surveyed 4,200 organizations across the world, running a variety of backup solutions, with 85% reporting that they were hit by a ransomware attack. Only 15% indicated that they were not successfully attacked, which is down from 24% the previous year. 

Not only are more of us getting attacked, but we’re also getting attacked more frequently. 

Michael Cade: In the Kubernetes space in, attacks around crypto mining is a trend potentially as the first wave where the attacker gains access to the cluster, plants their own mining application alongside workloads, and then leverages CPU cycles to mine cryptocurrency. These attacks are becoming more and more advanced. This may have been the extent of the attack before but now we are seeing exfiltration, encryption and deletion of data alongside the mining. This not only brings the disaster failure scenario to recover data but with a skills shortage around cloud native technologies, you need to make sure you have an easy button for recovering that data and moving swiftly without complexity and constraints.