How to Achieve a Cyber-Resilient Backup Strategy for Your MSP
The sudden shift in working practices has brought new problems for businesses when it comes to keeping data secure. Cybercriminals continue to innovate new phishing scams, ransomware attacks, and malicious activities.
Average backup software from MSP options would not suffice. Instead, this significant change calls for organizations to be extra vigilant and prioritize their cyber resilience.
What is cyber resilience?
Cyber resilience is an organization's capacity to prepare for, operate through and recover from the possibility of a cyber-attack. It combines cybersecurity, business continuity, and incident response as one.
In order for cyber resilience to work, certain security measures must be efficiently implemented, such as the ability to:
- Identify
- Protect
- Detect
- Respond
- Recover
It's important to remember that cyber resilience is not a one-time effort. It should be an ongoing practice that requires a holistic approach that includes people and processes.
Tips to Achieve a Cyber-resilient Backup Strategy
Backup software from MSP companies, as well as their entire backup strategies, need constant development to ensure they can deliver through their intended roles. This is crucial to address the heightened level of sophistication even when they become the target of the cyber-attack themselves.
Managed service providers must focus on two overarching essentials to create a cyber-resilient backup strategy:
- Augmenting backup environments against cyber-attacks
- Taking advantage of technologies that focus on speed of recovery
If you want to be a trusted MSP by your clients, here are some essential steps you might want to implement to strengthen your existing backup strategy:
Move away from tape backups
Tape backup systems utilize offsite media to deal with disaster recovery scenarios. The thing is, there is a very low probability of encountering a disaster so only a little attention is paid to the speed of recovery.
Given today's sophistication of cybercrimes, organizations may experience a cyber-attackâwell before they experience a disaster.
That is why a disk-based backup solution is a better choice in addition to reliable backup software for MSP. It overcomes the many limitations tape backups have, providing you with the opportunity for faster recovery and greater recovery assurances.
Backup everything you need
Backup all application data that support essential business processes, such as management services and data stored in the public cloud. This ensures you're able to recover your business to independently managed systems.
Make sure you backup your data in separate environments that are separated from the source systems and cloud environment under protection.
Your backup environment should also be controlled by a separate team to ensure proper separation of responsibilities between primary and backup systems.
Be smart with your passwords
It's always a good idea to strengthen your passwords with multi-step or multi-factor authentication. This will prevent attackers from overriding policy and wiping your backup systems.
And as basic as this one may seem, it's a golden rule that you need to oversee as an MSP: never store your passwords of backup systems in the same password vault as the systems they are guarding.
Be vigilant with your password management, especially when it comes to how you're storing them. This is important in helping you to throw off the final phase of an attacker's crime.
Audit and analyze to catch attacker in the act
Make sure all actions performed on the backup systems are auditable. Logs should be sent to your central Security Information and Event Management system (SIEM), which can help you spot unusual behaviors that do not seem to fit normal day-to-day or seasonal activities.
Ensure your SIEM is capable of providing inspection, correlation, and anomalous behavior discovery on access attempts, backup operations, and alteration changes.
Implement data retention
A latent attack aims to wait for clean backup copies to expire before moving forward with the final phase of the crime. As such, it's a good practice to keep backup copies for at least 60 days or longer. This increases your chance to recover from latent cyberattacks.
Retaining copies for longer periods of time forces attackers to take more time, which makes it harder for them to stay within your network without being noticed.
Leverage immutable data
Immutable backups ensure your data cannot be deleted before it is due to expire. Consider utilizing a system that supports the highest level of immutability in compliance mode. This prevents even the administrators from turning over a setting or deleting data before it expires.
Final Thoughts
Cyber resilience is all about having a comprehensive strategy and efficient processes. Having a cyber-resilient backup strategy ensures your backup software as MSP, as well as other data and applications, are secured. This results in increased customer confidence in your ability to cope with any eventuality.
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