Cyber-Resilience: Carpe Data and Fight Back Against Ransomware
A Ticking Time Bomb
You’ve read the statistics and seen the costly results. Ransomware attacks are rising 300% year over year. According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), out of 500 organizations, 84% were victims of malicious attacks in 2019. Of those, 89% of the attacks were successful with 93% experiencing data corruption or loss.
But that won’t happen to your business… right? Of course, deep down you know that it could, but it feels better to think, “What are the chances?”
You’ve got cyber-security tools in place. Everyone is careful with suspicious links. Our organization follows the 3-2-1 rule. But you still can’t help but wonder, “Is my backup strategy good enough? What if a cyber-attack is successful, and my applications are encrypted? Can I recover my data? How long will that take?”
The Threat is Real
Unfortunately, far too many businesses experience horrifying scenarios like the one you read. Government organizations, financial institutions, healthcare companies, and many more are being directly targeted and affected by high volumes of ransomware attacks. Here’s a quick summary of some of the most damaging attacks of 2020, reported by BlackFog’s State of Ransomware 2020 report.
Discovering the initial attack is only the tip of the iceberg. Downtime can last days and take months to fully recover and move on. And there is zero guarantee you will get your data back, even if you decide to pay the ransom. On that topic, analysts predict that ransom related costs will reach at least $20 billion this year.
Cybercriminals continue to profit from ransomware attacks, leaving no business immune. The attacks on Travelex and ISS World prove that we need a new approach. Operations stalled as the companies fought to retrieve data and get back online. In the case of Travelex, the company reportedly paid $2.3 million in ransom. Operations stalled as the companies fought to retrieve data and get back online. The attacks weren’t cheap either.
Cybercriminals and their organizations continue to find innovative ways of targeting and encrypting data. This includes targeting backup technology to ensure there is no recovery or to even determine where critical data is located to attack. Attacks will continue to gain sophistication and IT organizations must continue to evolve their approach and solutions to respond to the modern threat landscape. Backup technology is seen as the primary means to recover encrypted data. But has that been completely effective?
The Problem with Traditional Backup
Traditional backup relies on snapshots, performed periodically and done at a nightly, weekly, and monthly rate. IT organizations would love to take more granular snapshots, but they place a massive burden on production environments and are disruptive. This places an inherent limit on RPOs. But what about RTOs?
The very nature of snapshots for multi-VM applications poses RTO challenges for organizations. As a nightly backup is performed, one application has multiple VMs with snapshots at different time stamps, making recovery complex and time consuming.
It’s time to rethink using snapshots as a backup strategy.
Rethinking Your Backup Strategy
Zerto can help your business recover your applications in only a few clicks. Continuous data protection (CDP) saves data in intervals of seconds, not minutes, hours, or days. Zerto’s journal-based recovery is flexible enough to retrieve only what you need—a few files, virtual machines, an entire application stack, or even a full site. Enjoy granularity that lets you rewind to the last point-in-time before the attack, to within a matter of seconds. You can even shut down your current VM and failover to a new version with unencrypted, undisturbed original files. All within minutes. It really is that easy. Plus, you can also test your data with non-disruptive failover tests, any time you want. It’s easy to relax knowing your business can be back online at once with Zerto.
You might be thinking, “Okay, great. But this sounds too good to be true.” It’s okay, we get that a lot. And you’ll just have to trust us—the Zerto Platform really is that good.
If you’re still not convinced, let us prove it to you. Watch our webinar, “Carpe Data: Live Demo of Ransomware Recovery in Minutes.”
This webinar will provide:
- An in-depth review of modern attacks and the shortcomings of traditional backup
- A deep dive into using continuous data protection for recovery
- A demo of a ransomware recovery using Zerto’s continuous data protection
- And more!
Together, we won’t let the hackers win. Watch this webinar on-demand now and see for yourself how the Zerto Platform can help you be a hero and Carpe [your] Data today. Learn how Zerto can help you prevent data loss due to a ransomware attack.
Andy Fernandez 
