Can A Disaster Recovery Plan Protect Against The Effects of Ransomware Attacks?

Ransomware, along with malware, major server crashes, and even simple human error, is just one of many potential threats that can risk the integrity of your organization’s data at a moment’s notice. Any of these threats can quickly create a domino effect, resulting in costly downtime and disruption to everything from internal processes to end users.

And while these threats differ in origin and scope, they can all cripple your organization and create lasting ramifications if you’re not prepared to quickly recover and restore lost or compromised data. Enter the disaster recovery plan.

What is a Disaster Recovery Plan?

A disaster recovery plan is a core component of a business continuity plan, and is focused on objectives like restoring crucial data and workloads while minimizing any downtime caused by a disaster event. In today’s data-centric business environment, these are often the first steps in maintaining business continuity.

Without a robust disaster recovery plan in place, an event like a ransomware attack can leave a business vulnerable to catastrophic data loss and disruption to operations, which may result in revenue loss, damage to reputation, and even potential legal liabilities down the road.

What Can a Disaster Recovery Plan Do to Protect Against the Effects of a Ransomware Attacks?

Ransomware attacks have been on the rise for years and show no signs of slowing down.

When a ransomware attack occurs, an organization’s network is infected with malware that can wreak havoc on network infrastructure and compromise primary data. The goal of the attack is to disable the organization’s processes and disrupt business continuity. The perpetrator demands a ransom payment to (supposedly) reverse the effects and return any stolen or disabled data, allowing the organization to resume operations after the payment has been received.

As you can imagine, the costs of this situation can be widespread, involving everything from the ransom payment itself to performing IT forensics. And this is in addition to any data loss and costs stemming from downtime.

Yes, your organization can (and should) work to protect itself from disaster events like ransomware attacks from happening in the first place, but, as we’ve seen in recent years, that’s simply not enough. In fact, having a robust disaster recovery plan in place may be more important than merely taking steps to guard against disaster events.

So, while a disaster recovery plan cannot prevent a malicious threat like a ransomware attack — or any other disaster event for that matter — it can protect your organization from lasting damage stemming from data loss and downtime.

How Cloud Backup Fits with Disaster Recovery

With data now at the heart of every organization’s operations, the primary objective of a disaster recovery plan is getting data recovered and restored. While data backup was once mainly achieved with on-premises hardware, cloud backup has emerged as the most efficient and comprehensive method to automatically create and store backup copies of all data in the cloud. These constantly updated backup copies remain ready in case a data restore is needed. If that happens, the cloud backup platform can instantly start a recovery process that restores the most recent copy of the data, thus ensuring business continuity.

However, not every cloud backup solution includes the full capabilities needed to ensure a quick and full disaster recovery from a targeted attack like ransomware.

Potential Limitations of Some Cloud Backups Creates Risk of Data Loss and Downtime

Creating and storing copies of backup data is no longer enough to protect data from the sharp increase and efficacy of ransomware attacks — the backup copies themselves are also at risk of being stolen or compromised. If a ransomware attack successfully targets both your primary and backup data, there’s simply nothing you can do.

It’s also worth pointing out that the restore process can take an extremely long time if your cloud backup solution can only restore entire data instances rather than prioritizing the mission-critical data and workloads needed to keep operations going. If the restore time falls outside your Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO), you risk permanent data loss and costly downtime to vital infrastructure.

If you truly want a way to protect your backup data and ensure fast recovery time, you need a cloud backup solution that can:

1. Store backup data in a secured environment, away from the primary data
2. Provide a way to prioritize mission-critical data and workloads during recovery

Optimize Your Disaster Recovery Plan with the Industry’s Best Cloud Backup

Successful, timely disaster recovery is ultimately dependent on the tools you use. Clumio’s cloud-native, industry-leading cloud backup-as-a-service solution enables organizations of all sizes to securely back up data and workloads in the cloud, where it can then be swiftly recovered and restored if a disaster event strikes — whether it’s from ransomware or any other source.

Clumio achieves this by first storing backup copies in a safe, encrypted, air-gapped environment outside of an organization’s primary data account. Clumio’s rapid recovery features can identify and quickly restore the mission-critical data and applications needed to maintain business continuity.

Don’t risk your vital data to catastrophic threats like ransomware. Experience firsthand why Clumio is the industry’s leading innovator for cloud backup and rapid disaster recovery by scheduling a demo today. We’ll show you how your business can be up and running with Clumio in under 15 minutes, without the need to install any new infrastructure, software, or conduct any pre-planning beforehand.