Air-gapped backups: defend against malware
Traditionally, organisations have assumed that they can turn to their data backups if disaster strikes. However, backup and recovery environments are also vulnerable to attack, not least in organisations that have invested in sophisticated cross-site replication. When data is automatically replicated from one data centre to another, corrupt data and malware are also duplicated. Malware typically sits undetected for 200 days on average, giving it plenty of time to infect multiple copies of your data.
What’s more, a growing number of cyber attacks specifically target both the backup data and the backup catalogues — that is, the records that make sense of the backups and enable them to be recovered rapidly and selectively. In many organisations today, the backup catalogue has no effective defence against encryption or destruction.
To address this risk, organisations need a way to back up data so that it can’t be changed — an immutable backup — together with the ability to understand when production data has been corrupted.
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