According to the most recent CRN Quarterly Ransomware Report, malicious infrastructure attacks increased 3500% in 2016 and the percentage is expected to increase in 2017. One important way that organizations can help protect against losses in a ransomware attack is to have a backup of business critical information in case other defenses fail. Since ransomware attackers have invested heavily into neutralizing backup applications and operating system features like volume shadow copy, it is critical to have backups that are inaccessible to a malicious attacker.
The start of a new year is the perfect time to reassess your current backup strategy and policies and the impact to your business if your backup data is compromised. As security remains a high priority for our customers, Operations Management Suite (OMS) continues its commitment to offering holistic security capabilities. To demonstrate our continued investments in OMS, Azure Backup released a set of new features to protect your on-premises to cloud backups from ransomware.
Your backups need to be protected from sophisticated bot and malware attacks. Permanent loss of data can have significant cost and time implications to your business. To help protect against this, Azure Backup guards against malicious attacks through deeper security, faster notifications, and extended recoverability.
For deeper security, only users with valid Azure credentials will receive a security PIN generated by the Azure portal to allow them to backup data. If a critical backup operation is authorized, such as “delete backup data,” a notification is immediately sent so you can engage and minimize the impact to your business. If a hacker does delete backup data, Azure Backup will store the deleted backup data for up to 14 days after deletion.
To ensure this year is your data’s most secure year yet, make revisiting your backup policy one of your new year’s resolutions.
If you are an IT professional, you can explore the new Azure Backup capabilities by creating a free Microsoft Operations Management Suite account.
Finally, to learn more about ransomware and strategies you can employ to protect against it, watch our webinar Protecting Against Ransomware Threats.
