Over the past few years, SMEs have become painfully aware of the importance of backup and disaster recovery and the very real risks associated when organisations fail to properly protect their data. Cybercriminals have taken advantage of remote and hybrid work environments to conduct increasingly sophisticated attacks that have resulted in downtime and significant financial repercussions for SMEs—in fact, it’s estimated that SMEs spend an average of US$955,429 to restore normal business in the wake of a cyberattack.

AN EVER-CHANGING STORY
Thanks in part to these rapidly-evolving cyber-threats, the data recovery process after a cyberattack has become more complex. Cyber insurance companies are instating new requirements including critical audits and tests that SMEs must comply with in order to restore their data and receive a payout after an attack. Additionally, SMEs are often juggling multiple backup solutions that do not communicate with each other, resulting in an inability to view the entire data landscape and catch early warning signs of cyber-attack.

For SMEs to best protect their environments, they need to take a close look at their business continuity and disaster recovery plans to ensure they’re implementing the right cloud strategy, testing their systems often, and prioritising unified BCDR solutions that save time and provide more opportunities for automation.

The shift to remote working has changed the way organisations protect and store their data. Businesses had to accelerate their move to the cloud in the wake of the pandemic, resulting in data now living in more places than it ever did before. Analyst firm IDC found that 64.2 zettabytes of data were created in 2020 alone. This now means that backup solutions must also look to protect the data centre, endpoints, cloud and software as a service (SaaS). 

The shift to cloud technologies has enabled SMEs to better protect a growing amount of data and can increase cyber-resilience, as organisations can utilise disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) cloud technologies to recover off-site in the event of a cyberattack. When SMEs assess their cloud storage options as part of their BCDR plan, it’s crucial that they weigh key factors like their organisation’s compliance and security requirements as well as their technicians’ bandwidth to manage and maintain key systems. Often times highly regulated industries like finance and healthcare that deal with large volumes of sensitive data will opt for private cloud solutions due to the need for enhanced security while smaller organisations may opt for a combination of public and private cloud solutions to protect critical data in a more cost-effective way.

As the amount of data continues to grow from employees spread out across the globe, SMEs are finding that traditional on-premises data storage solutions will no longer meet their needs and that cloud storage is an inevitable part of their digital transformation efforts to safeguard data.

KEEP ON TESTING
As cyber-threats continue to proliferate, SMEs need to ensure they are frequently testing and updating their backup and recovery systems—because the worst time to realise backups are not working is immediately after a cyberattack. Testing should ideally happen once a month, or even weekly for more critical machines. When testing, SMEs need to ensure that they can do more than simply access the data—organisations need to be ensuring key applications are running smoothly by taking actions like testing transactions. As SMEs look to update their BCDR plans, they should prioritise solutions that allow for automated testing to ensure that testing efforts are streamlined and comprehensive.

A UNIFIED BCDR SOLUTION

SME technicians spend up to 33% of their day monitoring, managing, and troubleshooting backups, which stretches a technician’s already limited time and increases the risk of error. When SMEs are assessing their BCDR plans, they should look for a unified solution that provides a single view of the entire data landscape and includes time-saving automation capabilities that proactively fix common problems in the backup environment. These technologies include cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technologies that play a key role in detecting anomalies in backup behaviors that are often associated with ransomware and other malicious cyber-threats.

By thoroughly assessing their BCDR plans before an attack occurs, SMEs can ensure their IT environments are adequately protected from a range of threats now and in the future.

More info: www.unitrends.com