Ransomware is a major threat to IT environments worldwide. According to a report, cyber-crime cost $5 billion in 2017 and it is estimated that the costs will increase from $5 billion to $11.5 billion by 2019. These facts imply that the ransomware threat will persist and only grow. The only way to setup a ransomware-proof IT environment is to acquire and deploy reliable backup and disaster recovery solutions.
Not long ago, the IT world experienced ransomware like WannaCry and Petya. The devastation that these ransomware brought with them caught the eye of the world and ransomware was identified as a major threat to IT environments worldwide.
If you wish to read more about WannaCry, we wrote about it when the outbreak occurred: After WannaCry, What businesses need to withstand the ransomware era.
Interested about Petya? We wrote about it too: Petya – How to protect yourself from the Global Ransomware Outbreak
In case you’re wondering: What’s the big deal about ransomware anyways? How bad can they be? Let’s take a closer look at what ransomware are capable of.
Aftereffects of a successful Ransomware attack
After a ransomware successfully enters an enterprise IT environment, it completely stops operations. Data is encrypted and inaccessible and the malware demands payment via a crypto-currency. Unable to access their data, the affected organization/business/enterprise has only two options: pay the ransom and hope that their data will be recovered (security experts strongly advise against this) and not pay the ransom and resort to data recovery technology to recover their data.
Without reliable means to recover from ransomware, the organization/business has to endure:
Discontinuity – Without the encryption key, there’s no other way to access the encrypted data that ransomware locks away. Without the means to recover this data, all operations come to a screeching halt. That’s what happened to the WannaCry’s victims. Hospitals fell victim to the ransomware and entire systems were taken offline. This caused chaos as doctors were unable to access the important patient data required to provide healthcare.
Similarly other industries that were targeted by ransomware like WannaCry, Petya etc. were unable to continue operating. This affected not just the company or the business but also the end user.
Reputation Damage – Organizations/Businesses focus on continuous operations and provision of services. If an enterprise experiences a sudden halt, then this damages the enterprise’s reputation. Customers and end users would never choose an organization that experiences disruption and outages frequently.
With the inclusion of GDPR in the realm of data security, it is even more important to ensure that data is maintained and managed in a way that it’s safe from cyber-attacks like ransomware and is always recoverable.
Financial Losses – A successful ransomware attack results in thousands to millions of dollars in losses, depending on the victim. There are two paths for a ransomware victim: either pay the ransom or choose to recover from it using other means like backup infrastructures; provided that there were backup and disaster recovery solutions setup prior to the ransomware attack. Paying the ransom for enterprise data may sound as the best possible option but security experts advise against it. That’s because there’s a 50% chance that the ransomware authors have botched up the decryption code; implying that even with the decryption key, data may not be recovered.
However, attempting to recover data without effective data recovery technology is also costly. Consider the example of the city of Atlanta, Georgia, USA. The ransomware ‘SamSam’ attacked Atlanta in April 2018 resulting in crippling the court system, the police department and other departments. Estimates say that it will take Atlanta millions of dollars to recover the data that was compromised due to the ransomware attack. This is because Atlanta was unprepared for the cyber-attack and didn’t have effective backup and disaster recovery solutions setup prior to it.
All of the losses incurred by ransomware like SamSam, WannaCry, Petya etc. could’ve been easily avoided with StoneFly’s DR365™.
Data Protection from Ransomware with StoneFly DR365™
With the right technology in place organizations/businesses/enterprises can turn the disaster of ransomware into a mere inconvenience. StoneFly’s feature-rich backup and disaster recovery appliance – DR365™ offers enterprise-level technology and software that simplifies backup and ensures high availability and business continuity for enterprise workloads.
DR365™ is equipped with the hardware and software that can make it very easy to recover from events like ransomware, natural disaster, accidental/malicious deletion etc.
The purpose-built backup and disaster recovery appliance comes in different configurations and is scalable to accommodate PetaBytes (PBs) of backup data. IT environments can choose from a single node, High availability (HA) node and a scale-out node configuration. This accommodates environments:
- With a determined and fixed amount of data.
- Focused on high availability and business continuity.
- With variable and continuously growing data.
With enterprise-level data services, DR365™ reduces Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) to less than 15 minutes. With services like deduplication, thin provisioning, erasure coding, synchronous and asynchronous replication and more – DR365™ delivers:
- Enhanced value-for-money for the Backup and DR infrastructure
- Optimized utilization rates
- Reduced RTPOs (RTOs and RPOs)
- Full and Instant recovery of VMs
- Support for Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware ESX/ESXi, VMware vsphere hypervisors
- Cloud connect backup to Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and other public clouds
- 1-click instant recovery for enterprise workloads
- And more
Instead of waiting for a ransomware attack, prepare your enterprise IT environment and make it ransomware-proof with StoneFly’s cost effective and innovative DR365™.
Interested about the enterprise-level backup and disaster recovery appliance? Contact us and get a quote today
