Spotlight on Cloud Backup for Cybersecurity Awareness Month

Fall is upon us! Which means it’s pumpkin spiced latte season and Cybersecurity Awareness Month is just around the corner. It’s a good time to check in on your incident response playbook, particularly the recovery phase. Remember, your cloud provider is responsible for the durability and uptime of their service, but your data—its resilience, integrity, and security—is your responsibility.

Risk profiles for cloud data encompass a range of scenarios, including unintentional data deletion due to human error, erroneous software deletes, malicious wipeouts, insider threats from disgruntled or departing employees, and targeted ransomware campaigns. A robust backup and recovery strategy, fortified with features such as data versioning, encryption, and air gaps, serves to enhance organizational data resilience. This multi-layered approach aims to minimize the impact of adverse data incidents by ensuring fast and secure data restoration, thus mitigating operational downtime and financial losses.

Snapshots, often stored in production accounts, share the same risk as production data. Cross-account snapshots are also not enough, as they still fall under the organization’s primary security domain. For example, if an actor gains access to the right workload or the right administrator credentials, all data can often be manipulated. A more secure approach involves creating a virtual air gap between the primary account and the backup storage, offering an out of band layer of defense against ransomware and other cyberattacks.

Benefits of air-gapped backups

• Ransomware resilience: Air-gapped backups ensure data recoverability, even when primary datasets are compromised.
• Data integrity: Unauthorized access and data tampering are mitigated, particularly with immutable backups.
• Regulatory compliance: Cybersecurity insurance and specific industry regulations often mandate air-gapped backups, ensuring both data protection and policy adherence.
• Rapid recovery: Air-gapped backups facilitate quick data restoration, reducing downtime and mitigating adverse impacts.
• Assurance: Secure backups offer peace of mind and enable IT resources to focus on other mission-critical operations.

Stronger data protection through air-gapped, immutable backups is just one of the reasons that customers turn to Clumio. As organizations grow their cloud presence, controlling costs becomes another challenge to tackle. IT teams are tasked with reducing cloud costs, but often lack visibility into where they can cut their AWS bill without limiting business innovation.

Analyst firm ESG found that Clumio helps customers reduce costs by 30% on average through a uniquely architected solution that optimizes backup and recovery processes. Consumption reports further assist IT teams by identifying where organizations are spending the most for their AWS backups so they can better manage their storage spend. Clumio customers are typically able to reduce their backup costs while increasing their data security.

Cybersecurity Awareness Month serves as an important reminder to evaluate and enhance your data resilience strategies. Join us at the Gartner IT Symposium in Orlando, Florida, at Booth #147. Stop by to chat with me or our Field CTO about how Clumio fits into your AWS data protection strategy while meeting your budget constraints.

• Best Practices Checklist for Ransomware Protection
• Recovering from Ransomware Attacks
• Secure, Immutable, Air-gapped Data Protection
• Coffee Talk: Former NSA Officer’s Advice on Preparing for Increased Cyberthreats