ITWC recently spoke with Dan Hamilton, VP of Technology at Whipcord, about the secret to successful Disaster Recovery in the face of growing cybersecurity threats.
ITWC: What is the cybersecurity landscape looking like for companies in 2021?
Ransomware is hitting across all verticals, from small businesses to enterprise, municipalities and government. These attacks have no set price tag attached. It’s not like a company’s leadership team can sit down and say ‘An attack costs this much, and we can afford that.’ Damages range anywhere from hundreds to millions of dollars.
ITWC: So companies acknowledge the high likelihood of being attacked – how do they beat hackers at their own game?
I think it’s a matter of thinking strategically and being prepared. Good security practices are of course essential, but at the end of the day it’s important to acknowledge the inevitability of attack and then focus on a recovery strategy that minimizes downtime.
It’s important to ensure that your backups are offsite and adequately protected. We’ve seen some attacks where backup systems have been targeted and backups deleted. Our Veeam® Cloud Connect service has mechanisms in place to ensure that your offsite copy can’t be tampered with.
ITWC: What sort of downtime can companies expect after a ransomware attack?
This varies greatly depending on the approach taken and the amount of preparation. With a solution like Veeam Cloud Connect Replication, a well-prepared company can be back up and running in a couple of hours. Contrast this with a company who has only local backups and needs to fully restore those backups (assuming they’re even viable). With our solution, it’s just a matter of powering on your replicas and re-directing traffic to our infrastructure.
ITWC: So what’s the secret to a success Disaster Recovery plan?
We’ve learned through long experience that the devil is in the details. Things like having pre-configured connectivity in place to your DR site or provider, making sure firewall rules on the DR side are kept up to date and ensuring you have all the information available for tasks such as updating your public DNS to point to the DR site. These details are the difference between a successful recovery and one that ends up with significant downtime.
A large part of the value that we bring with Disaster Recovery as a Service, is helping our customers through the planning process and making sure they don’t miss these kinds of details.
ITWC: Why DR-as-a-Service rather than doing it in-house?
There’s nothing wrong with an in-house DR solution, but it requires a lot of overhead – a second data centre in a safe location, additional hosts and storage, and additional licensing. You end up with all of this capital investment essentially sitting doing nothing most of the time. It makes much more financial sense to leverage someone else’s infrastructure investment and only pay for the capacity you need. And Veeam’s Cloud Connect makes this very easy to use.
To see some examples of how Veeam Backup & Replication™ is helping different types of organizations to mitigate ransomware, click here.
