Blog

Ransomware Happens. It’s What Happens Next That Counts

By Zack Brigman - Senior Manager, Product Marketing

October 18, 2021

By Zack Brigman – Senior Manager, Product Marketing

We’re now into October, and another cybersecurity awareness month is upon us. But with the recent rash of high-profile data breaches, the emergence of new attack schemas, and businesses experiencing some of the loftiest ransomware payout demands on record – this year feels a bit different. While it’s increasingly challenging to keep pace with bad actors, data protection is playing an invaluable role in reducing the impact of a potential attack, and even spotting it before the damage is widespread or catastrophic. Businesses of all sizes are finding that #beingcybersmart, is dependent on being cyber-ready.

Ransomware extortionists are aggressively increasing their efforts with many snagging highly lucrative 7-figure payouts per attack, and criminal organizations are exploiting everyone from the largest of Fortune 500s to smallest of family-run boutiques – finding new and clever ways to infiltrate businesses, systems, and their data. And as CIOs and board rooms develop new strategies to combat the inevitable, half of cybersecurity professionals still believe their organizations are not prepared to deal with a successful breach.1

Here’s how smart data protection plays its part.

The Last Line of Defense

A cyber-ready ransomware strategy includes a multi-faceted approach. And while implementing preventative measures that ward off attackers is critically important, you also need smart solutions that minimize the impact of a successful breach. Data is the crown jewel of your organization, and it needs to be accessible and recoverable to minimize downtime and even worse – data loss. The right data protection solution plays a critical role in staying cyber-ready, and largely represents your last line of defense. Not only can it provide robust controls to restore and recover data fast, but it can also reduce the blast radius of a successful breach with capabilities like anomaly detection, to identify patterns in data and access that give early warning of attackers who have gotten in the door. As bad actors deploy more sophisticated tactics in an attempt to paralyze an organization’s ability to respond, effective data management insulates your data, putting it out of reach – meaning less downtime, stronger business continuity, and no payouts.

It Takes a Village

Data Management as a Service, from Metallic, provides businesses with controls to secure and restore data in the cloud, to lessen the impact of an attack. Customers get zero-trust, multi-layered security, with air-gapped data backups. This ensures successful breaches in production environments cannot also infect backup copies, as they are isolated in a separate security domain. But it’s not just ransomware response. You also benefit from top-tier security tooling and incident response, which complement customer self-service options. This allows Metallic to uncover dormant ransomware files and flag them for customer remediation. By monitoring irregularities and behaviors in data, Metallic can spot latent ransomware and inform proper backup operations to sanitize threats. This dual approach keeps Metallic customers cyber-ready by helping to identify ransomware before it spreads, alongside tools to rapidly recover from attack.

Keep an eye on the blogs from Metallic and Commvault throughout the month of October for more insight on the role of data management in your cyber-readiness strategy. And for more information on Metallic watch this on-demand video and see how we keep data safe, compliant, and recoverable from ransomware attack.