It’s that time of year again! No, not the time for holiday shopping or beach getaways. It’s World Backup Day, a yearly nudge (or perhaps a gentle shove) for everyone to prioritize the often-overlooked task of backing up their data. While techies might scoff at the notion of needing a dedicated day for backups, the reality is that data loss can strike anyone, anytime. From a hardware malfunction to a nasty case of ransomware, irreplaceable photos, documents, and work projects can vanish in an instant.
This year’s World Backup Day, which falls on March 31st, 2024, is a prime opportunity to re-evaluate your backup strategy. Are you relying on a single, aging external hard drive tucked away in a corner? Is your cloud storage on autopilot, with no recent verification? World Backup Day serves as a springboard to explore robust backup solutions, ensuring your digital life is safe and sound.
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Backups are a critical last line of defense for businesses, acting much like an insurance policy for their data in the event of a cyberattack, ransomware infection, or accidental deletion. However, it’s important to remember that backups are just one piece of the puzzle. Companies should also focus on proactive security measures like hardening endpoints, maintaining strong cyber hygiene, and implementing a robust vulnerability remediation process for a holistic cyber defense strategy.
Right now, a lot of the major cyberattacks that are making the news are from cybercriminal groups – either ransomware gangs or threat actors that are simply stealing data (credentials, credit card data, Social Security numbers, etc.). They target data for financial gain, using it for identity theft, credit card fraud, or selling it on the black market.
Most companies should be regularly reviewing their cybersecurity defenses to protect against cybercriminals. Are you scanning for missing patches, vulnerabilities, and security exposures regularly? And when you find them, is your team able to prioritize the fixes based on your environment, or are you finding that you’re often just accepting the risk because it’s too hard to implement a remediation? We’ve seen organizations get hacked again and again due to un-remediated, older, less severe vulnerabilities. This is what we’d consider the first line of defense. The last line is regular backups. Are you taking and testing backups regularly, and maintaining them in a secure, offsite location so you can recover your data in case of an attack? Understanding your security from end to end is critical to defending your organization from malicious actors.
Read the full article on VMBlog.
