Even those lucky enough not to have first-hand experience know someone who has been affected by ransomware. The typical attack involves an email which at first glance appears legitimate and sent from a known contact. The user is tricked into opening email attachments or visiting malicious links that snuck through email filters. From there, the system is compromised and the virus works to encrypt files on the server, and your data is held for ransom.
How do you deal with the threat that is continually evolving, considering mitigation strategies like virus protection and link scanning will never be completely effective? There is a solution – be ready! Expect that it can happen and be ready for it when it does.
The best protection – CLOUD protection
For those that have not yet embraced the cloud, changing how you work will provide a huge mitigating step. Modernized environments are effectively immune to ransomware. For example, cloud storage like SharePoint Online and OneDrive aren’t typically targeted because these services inherently provide file versioning, so retrieving a ransomed file is a trivial rollback effort. Ransomware authors are looking for files that are stored locally without backups, or stored on network shares, which may have had backups at one time, (but is anyone monitoring them?)
For Crestwood Cloud clients, effective threat mitigation on our cloud servers is included in our service. We provide this through our backup process. It is entirely separate from the virtual machine itself, so it’s not possible for the backups to be compromised by the same attack that affected the virtual machine, potentially going back and corrupting previous backups (contrast with SQL backups saved to the server — effective ransomware should be expected to encrypt all those backups) . We can easily restore any virtual machine to a point before the attack, no matter how much damage was done during the infection. Because of this, our environments are immune to ransomware.
Sounds like bold statement, but it’s not difficult to protect yourself — if you take steps ahead of time and think in terms of “when” not “if.” The prevalence of ransomware is really only a testament to how many organizations neglect their disaster recovery. Learn more about how easy it is to protect yourself from computer threats with the Crestwood Cloud.
Ready for the cloud? For pricing and more information, contact a cloud expert at sales@crestwood.com.
