Best Practices for Protecting Your Data in Today’s New Reality

The global pandemic and economic crisis unfolding before us is a new reality for everyone, creating complex challenges that must be managed in bold new ways. Unfortunately, concerns about interruptions in the IT supply chain are real. And we know that bad actors get more aggressive, not less, during times like these. We all want to focus on helping each other during this period. Now is the time to support those on the front lines of the pandemic and strengthen our defenses against those who want to prey on our companies, people and data when they are most vulnerable.

Adapting Best Practices for This Reality

Dwight D. Eisenhower said, “In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” A more colorful version was made popular by Mike Tyson. “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” In the world of data protection, the eventuality we have all been planning for is now our reality, but it has come with some twists that we must quickly adapt to and plan for.

When planning for data protection, most of the focus is on scenarios involving site outages and in extreme cases, regional disasters. Very few would have anticipated an event that reached every corner of the globe as it has in this pandemic. The pressure healthcare systems and public safety organizations are seeing from interruptions in supply chains for needed equipment and supplies are clearly visible on the news, but there are also significant challenges in the underlying information systems.

Therefore, it is important to re-evaluate data protection plans. We must understand that the availability of needed hardware may be interrupted and that people may be locked down and unable to physically access data centers to do hardware installs anyway.

On another front, COVID-19 is already proving to be a theme that has one of the largest concentrations of cyber attacks that we have ever seen. City and state governments, along with private, public and higher-ed school systems, are the most frequently targeted and most vulnerable. With work from home and remote learning scenarios being rapidly deployed, the attack surface for these organizations has been greatly increased.

Cloud-first, SaaS-first Strategies Help Share the Burden

Leveraging the public cloud and the many available enterprise SaaS applications is a way that any organization facing challenges in these areas can quickly plan for these new realities. In the case of data protection, choosing the right solution can give users instant access to data protection capacity to ensure SLAs can be achieved even when capacity runs low on existing systems. It also gives those most vulnerable to ransomware attacks a rapidly deployable, “air-gapped” solution that ensures that they have a good copy of their data in the event of a ransomware attack.

This is a concern we frequently hear from our customers. Cory Smith, CIO for the City of Davenport recently told us, “We take comfort in knowing that our backup data is stored in the Clumio service, safely and air-gapped. It’s one less thing we need to worry about related to ransomware and malware.”

Clumio can onboard new customers in 15 minutes, set their backup policies and start protecting data automatically with our SaaS-based approach to data protection, backed by the scale and elasticity of the public cloud. Users don’t need to spend any time on complicated sizing exercises or figuring out how to access data centers to install hardware. Instead, you can get focused on other IT priorities. If something goes wrong, Clumio proactive support will let the user know. Most of the time, we are able to fix the problem within the service, so customers don’t need to worry about fixes or patches either.

Clumio wants to do all it can to help those most affected during this unprecedented and uncertain time. If your organization is on the front lines and needs help, we have created a fast track response [ENDED] to get you quickly engaged with technical resources that can assess your needs and recommend solutions.

We wish everyone good health and resiliency as we work through this together.