Cyberattacks, data breaches, and accidental deletions are occurring on an almost daily basis. In fact, human error is the main contributor in 95% of all breaches. One powerful approach to safeguarding your data is through immutable backups.
But what exactly are immutable backups, why are they so important and what are the benefits?
This post will explore what immutable backups are and highlight the top advantages of implementing them to protect your most important data.
What Are Immutable Backups?
Immutable backups are data copies that cannot be altered, deleted, or encrypted once they are created. This immutability ensures that the backup data are shielded and secure from any form of tampering or corruption. By employing Write Once Read Many (WORM) technology, these backups provide a reliable means for data protection.
This immutability provides an extra layer of protection against threats, including ransomware attacks, accidental deletions, and insider threats.
Importance of Immutable Backups
According to a report by Cybersecurity Ventures, global cybercrime costs are expected to reach $10.5 trillion annually by 2025. With such high costs, the need for robust data protection mechanisms becomes evident as immutable backups offer a significantly lower cost to defend against these threats, ensuring that your critical data remains intact and accessible when they are needed.
Let's dive into the top five benefits of implementing immutable backups to protect your critical data and saving you in potential data loss costs.
1. Enhanced Protection Against Ransomware
By creating backups that cannot be modified or deleted, organizations ensure that they always have a clean copy of their data to restore from, even if their primary systems are compromised. This significantly reduces the impact of ransomware attacks and eliminates the need to pay ransom demands.
Immutable backups provide an extra layer of defense by ensuring that once data is backed up, it cannot be encrypted by ransomware. This means organizations can restore their systems from these untampered backups without paying ransom - minimizing human downtime and financial loss.
2. Compliance with Data Retention Regulations
Many industries are subject to strict data retention regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, and FINRA. These regulations often mandate the retention of data in a secure and unalterable format. For example, the healthcare sector must comply with HIPAA, which requires by law the retention of certain records for up to six years.
Immutable backups help organizations comply with these regulations by providing a verifiable trail of data integrity and authenticity, reducing the risk of non-compliance penalties.
3. Protection Against Insider Threats
While external threats often grab headlines, insider threats pose a significant risk to data integrity. A study by the Ponemon Institute found that 60% of organizations experienced more than 30 insider incidents per year. Immutable backups provide an additional safeguard against malicious or accidental actions by employees or contractors with privileged access.
What does an insider threat look like?
4. Simplified and Cost-Effective Business Continuity
In the event of a catastrophic data loss, immutable backups can dramatically simplify and accelerate the disaster recovery process from weeks to less than a few days and in some cases hours. According to IBM, global average cost of a data breach in 2023 was USD 4.45 million, a 15% increase over 3 years, with a significant portion attributed to business downtime and lost productivity.
With immutable backups, organizations can be confident that their recovery point is genuine and uncompromised, allowing for faster and more reliable system restoration. This can significantly reduce downtime and associated costs in the aftermath of a data loss event.
While the initial setup may require investment, the reduced risk of data loss, ransomware payments, and regulatory fines can result in significant savings. Additionally, the assurance of data integrity can enhance operational efficiency by reducing the time and resources spent on data recovery efforts.
5. Protection from supply chain attacks in as-a-service applications
SaaS applications are the #1 target for ransomware attacks and often an easy target, especially if these applications are not managed by IT. However, there are two specific types of threats in SaaS:
- Direct exploit of the customer (their tenant). This is where due to misuse of credentials or privilege escalation, an attacker gains access to a SaaS application (ex. GitHub)
- Supply chain attacks happen when the vendor is compromised, and therefore, all tenants are compromised as well.
Having an offsite, immutable copy in another cloud platform (ex., Amazon S3 Object Lock) or on-premises of your SaaS applications is the only way to guarantee recovery and business continuity after a ‘successful’ attack.
Maintaining data integrity is crucial for many organizations, particularly those in regulated industries. Immutable backups provide an unalterable record of data at specific points in time, which can be invaluable for audit purposes or forensic investigations.
Immutable backups provide an unalterable record of data, which is crucial for maintaining data integrity and trust. For instance, in the financial sector, ensuring the integrity of transaction records is paramount. Immutable backups can guarantee that financial data remains accurate and untampered, fostering trust among stakeholders and clients.
Conclusion
As cyber threats continue to be the norm and data protection regulations become more stringent, implementing immutable backups is becoming an essential component of a comprehensive data protection strategy. The ability to safeguard data from ransomware, comply with regulatory requirements, recover from accidental deletions, achieve cost-effective protection, and ensure data integrity makes immutable backups an indispensable solution for any organization.
While the implementation may require some initial investment and changes to existing backup processes, the long-term benefits in terms of data protection and peace of mind are significant for both you and your organization.
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