How IT-Resilience Can Help Protect Organizations From Ransomware Attacks

Ransomware is one of the most harmful cyber-attacks facing organizations today. Ransomware is a kind of malware, often distributed via emails and unsafe web links, that encrypts all of the files on a computer, before rapidly spreading across a network. Attackers then demand a ransom from the affected organization, threatening to destroy the data if the ransom is not paid.

Ransomware attacks are also becoming more targeted and sophisticated. Ransomware attacks we do see are becoming more targeted, better implemented, and far more ruthless. There are also increasing numbers of malicious government and rogue-nation state sponsored attacks on the private sector.

Ransomware is difficult to prevent, even with strong security solutions in place, and organizations are heavily investing in ways to remediate against these harmful cyber-attacks. Data back-up and recovery solutions are one of the key areas that organizations are investing in to keep their data protected against ransomware.

Expert Insights spoke to Caroline Seymour, VP of marketing from IT-resilience platform Zerto, to find out more about the importance of data recovery in the battle against ransomware.

What is IT-Resilience?

Seymour describes IT-resilience as the “evolution of business continuity and disaster recovery.” IT resilience tools like Zerto allow organizations to quickly recover from business disasters and recover lost data, including from cyber-attacks such as ransomware. The Zerto platform is used for cloud migration, disaster recovery and back-up, and is delivered in one scalable solution.

IT-resilience should be an important aspect of every organization’s strategy to protect against cyber-attacks, says Seymour. “IT Resilience means being able to protect the business from any type of disruption and ensure that an organization can be up and running and available at all times.”

Speed is of the essence when combatting ransomware attacks, and there can be devastating consequences for businesses if they have no systems in place to rapidly recover from ransomware. 

If you get hit by ransomware, and it gets through your perimeter, it can have a catastrophic effect on your organization,” Seymour says. “It’s not just if you pay for the ransom. It’s the loss of productivity, the cost of recovery itself, it can cause reputational damage. It’s extremely significant and can have huge impacts on businesses.

How IT-Resilience Helps Organizations Recover from Ransomware

IT-resilience platforms like Zerto provide multiple features to help organizations recover from ransomware more effectively.

The ‘core foundation,’ of the Zerto platform is continuous data protection, Seymour says. Zerto offers continuous data journaling, which involves replicating all of the data across an organization continuously, and autonomously. This constant replication of data doesn’t require any back-up downtime and ensure that the back-ups are always up to date.

Having this kind of data back-up in place is hugely beneficial to organizations when recovering from ransomware attacks. With the journaling that Zerto offers in place, organizations hit by ransomware can literally recover data in intervals of up to five seconds, instantly recovering the lost data.

This is a crucial feature for organizations to recover from ransomware. Without needing to pay the ransom, or suffer from downtime, organizations can quickly restore lost data and applications, saving a huge amount of time and cost.

“It’s fully automated, near real-time replication,” Seymour says. “With this in place, we can recover the data and get organizations up and running in the fastest way possible.”

This data recovery works in cases of data loss beyond ransomware attacks, including in accidental data loss and in cases where cloud migrations have gone wrong, another benefit for organizations.

“IT-resilience is one of the best ways for organizations to mitigate the risks of ransomware,” Seymour says. The risks from ransomware are obvious, and security tools are never 100% effective. “Organizations need to consider having a IT-resilience in place to recover from ransomware attacks effectively and efficiently.”

Find out more about Zerto here: https://www.zerto.com/