The growing threat

The threat from ransomware is growing with the sophistication of the attacks – and technical ability of the attackers – constantly challenging the security measures implemented by businesses striving to protect their systems and data in an increasingly hostile cyber environment.

It's no longer a case of if a business is attacked, but when, and, at that point, how ready is the business to recover effectively and efficiently from such an attack? There are few second chances when the stakes are so high.

A recent Sophos survey indicated 59% of global businesses were hit by some form of ransomware. 94% of businesses indicated that the attackers had attempted to compromise their backup systems, with 57% being successful.

The time to assess the ability of a business to fully recover has never been more urgent, with a stress on the proactiveness of that preparation time. Identifying any flaws in the plan, or recovery technology deployed, are crucial tasks in a business fitness test.

Fully testing the recoverability of an organisation requires frequent testing – and this can only be carried out effectively if the testing process is non-disruptive, quick, simple and encompasses the business' entire system and data. Crucially, the skillset and prior experience of staff charged with conducting a successful recovery needs to be factored in for a requirement so nuanced and potentially infrequent.

When the chaos and stress of a business-threatening ransomware attack is unfolding, discovering unnoticed or overlooked flaws in the recovery plan – alongside a lack of skills and experience in business recovery – is irresponsible business practice. Having the confidence to invoke an extremely well-tested and orchestrated business recovery process is critical. When security is compromised this could be the only time to thwart the attempts of cyber criminals to extort significant sums from the business, often even business-ending.

Cloud provider effectiveness

MSPs are ideally positioned to offer DRaaS and BaaS platforms that provide non-disruptive disaster recovery testing, enabling teams charged with business recovery to carry out full and frequent tests without impacting production environments. Additionally, the separation of cloud recovery systems from the production environments adds another layer of much-needed protection.

MSPs specialising in disaster recovery technologies can significantly improve the recovery of an organisation when struck by ransomware. MSPs will have the experience, exposure and expertise to advise on effective techniques and services to deploy, balancing business requirements with available budgets, keeping those achievable RTOs and RPOs realistic.

MSPs can remove many of the concerns for organisations when considering and budgeting for disaster recovery solutions, including; the capital cost of the hardware and software required; the ability to scale up or down as business needs change; the necessary skills required to maintain such a system and invoke a recovery when needed; and the ongoing maintenance costs and inevitable renewal costs.

An update to your approach

Now is the time to shift thinking within IT teams, but also the wider business, about the potential for risk and the collaborative efforts required to protect the business from what will become an undeniable set of threats.

The recommended rhythm and cadence of testing might seem unrealistic, or even unachievable with the current technology deployed within a business. That's ok. What we strongly believe is that by setting in place a new standard – even if simply an improvement on the status quo at first – businesses can create a necessary shift in mindset towards recoverability and data usability. Setting this new operational standard will undoubtedly place the business in a better state of readiness to recover from a major issue, as and when it happens.

Author: Stephen Young, Executive Director