Cloud computing has the power to transform your business and drive faster innovation. But with great power comes great responsibility – like protecting sensitive data and user privacy from the malicious onset of ransomware attacks.
Cloud security and ransomware attacks are mounting concerns. According to Gartner, 80 percent of CIOs plan to increase spending on cyber/information security in 2024. Protecting data and safeguarding your business from ransomware attacks is both a legal and moral requirement. Failure to do so can incur staggering costs, loss of reputation, and costly business interruptions – it can even lead to the demise of your employee morale and business. A cloud-smart plan that includes powerful data backup and disaster recovery tools can save your organization from a world of hurt.
Ransomware Attack: A Cloud Security Emergency
With cyberattack incidents accelerating, it’s not a matter of if your business will face a ransomware attack, but when. Focusing on prevention to thwart ransomware attacks isn’t enough, and that’s a new reality that is having serious consequences.
The April 2024 IMF Global Financial Stability Report found that the risk of extreme losses from cyber incidents is increasing. “Such losses could potentially cause funding problems for companies and even jeopardize their solvency.” There are 19 ransomware attacks every second, and ransomware is expected to cost its victims USD $265 billion annually by 2031. Compounding the challenge is the fact that criminals are getting smarter – and sneakier. Statistics show that it takes security teams an average of 277 days to identify and contain ransomware attacks. Prevention methods alone simply cannot keep up with the advanced techniques that savvy hackers use to infiltrate your infrastructure, lock up your data, and hold your business hostage.
Hackers are proving to be heartless, targeting essential services, charity organizations, educational institutions, and healthcare. In February 2024 alone, ransomware attacks were perpetrated on a children’s hospital, a trade union, pipeline and water utilities, an automaker, and a critical infrastructure software maker. Even the US Government is not immune to cloud security risks. The SolarWinds hack and the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack prove how vulnerable critical infrastructure is to criminal infiltration. “Foreign hackers…shut down a major beef processor, showing in the space of one month that foreign adversaries can switch off the US fuel and food supplies at will.”
The First Step in Effective Risk Management: Accepting the Inevitability of Attacks
The threat of ransomware attacks can feel overwhelming, inevitable, and hopeless. Today’s cyberattacks are fast-evolving, sophisticated, and cost far more than the ransom itself in loss of business, reputational damage, exposure to liabilities, and the costs of public relations, legal fees, and escalating IT expenditures.
No sector is safe from ransomware attacks, and no digital infrastructure, however robust, can save your organization from being attacked, but the inevitability of a cyberattack doesn’t have to mean that your business is defenceless. A shift in perspective from prevention to preparation and recovery helps drive a cloud-smart business continuity strategy to safeguard your customer data.
Resilience: The Key to Comprehensive Cloud Security
Once an attack occurs, your organization faces a series of critical decisions in a frighteningly short time. Do you pay the ransom? Can you block the hacker from infiltrating more data or destroying your backup? Can you restore business operations, and how long will that take? How can you protect your business and its customers or users from further catastrophe?
The more your business depends on complex digital infrastructure, the more vulnerable you are to disaster. So, it makes sense to implement a cloud-smart plan to thwart the hackers. You may not be able to lock them out completely, but you can turn their mission into mission impossible by mitigating the damage and recovering quickly and efficiently.
Business Continuity Planning: Survival of the Fittest
The average cost of downtime for an organization is USD $88,000 per hour. That constitutes a staggering loss when you consider that the average downtime caused by a ransomware attack is 16.2 days.
The critical role of business continuity planning in mitigating the impact of ransomware attacks is a priority in a cloud-smart plan. Robust data backup and disaster recovery tools can be customized to fit the needs of your organization and provide lifesaving protection for your data.
At ThinkOn, we design data protection and recovery solutions that repel ransomware attacks, protect data in the event an attack happens, and help you get up and running fast and efficiently. A comprehensive disaster recovery plan is critical to saving your organization from insolvency, reputational damage, and the consequences of non-compliance.
Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) and Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS)
Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) is a cost-effective solution to cloud security, but it’s not enough. You need to include Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) in your cloud-smart plan. Here’s why ThinkOn’s BaaS & DRaaS are better together:
- Industry-leading DRaaS with Zerto and Veeam at near-instantaneous RPO/RTO offer the gold standard of disaster recovery.
- BaaS data protection with Veeam and RansomGuard provides comprehensive protection.
- With ThinkOn’s global data centre locations, you choose where to replicate your data.
- We’re data backup software agnostic. Use Veeam? CommVault? With our solutions, you don’t have to change or pick just one.
- No-nonsense billing with no fine print means no escalating cloud allocation use charges and no hidden fees.
When it comes to a ransomware event, resilience is entirely dependent on how your data backup infrastructure and disaster recovery solutions are implemented, whether you can identify the way the threat behaves, and the steps you take to address it.
At ThinkOn, we are data protection experts, and we know how to store and manage data so hackers won’t compromise your cloud security. Our Thinkers take a cloud smart approach, and we’re here to help you ask the right questions to prepare your cybersecurity plan – and in the event of a cyberattack, we’re available with 24/7 support.
The True Value of a Cloud-Smart Plan: It’s Not Just About the Money
A cloud-smart plan will include tools such as Immutable Backup and Data Clean Room cloud services. It will also consider your Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO).
Do you know your organization’s tolerance for downtime? Have you weighed the cost of downtime versus the initial cost of prevention and recovery systems? Have you run the necessary tabletop exercises to test your recovery theories? Do you have the right cloud services and support structures in place to assist you in the event of a cyberattack?
You’ll want to know every aspect of your recovery and include it in your plan. For instance, do you have cyber insurance in place to cover your ransomware losses? Insurance companies today often require evidence that you’ve done due diligence to prevent – and recover from – an attack. Do you know what those requirements are?
Also consider the human costs. Do you know the ramifications of failing to protect sensitive data in the event of an attack? Will you need to cover the cost of stress leave for staff, or the potential loss of skills if the staff on leave are members of your IT team? Will staff or customers hold you legally responsible for losses and/or pain and suffering due to exposure of sensitive data? Planning for these contingencies will go a long way toward protecting both your business and the people who rely on you.
Continuous Adaptation: Tools to Navigate the Changing Digital Landscape
The digital world is constantly evolving, so keep your systems up to date. Practice good patch management and keep operating systems current so the bad guys find it difficult to infiltrate. Automated updates, AI-powered data and system analysis and reporting can help you stay ahead of cyber criminals and block their ransomware attacks. ThinkOn cloud security, data storage and archiving, and business continuity tools help you take advantage of advanced data analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to protect data from security breaches, ransomware attacks and fast-track your digital transformation journey.
Collaboration and Training: The Secret Weapons of a Cloud Security Plan
Cybercriminals count on you being unprepared for their underhanded tactics. That’s why a cloud-smart plan includes collaboration tools and techniques, information sharing, training, and an investment in technology.
The most common entry points of ransomware include phishing, poor user practices, and weak passwords. You can protect your business from these threats by involving every person at every level of your organization in a comprehensive cloud security plan that includes training employees to recognize and isolate risks, and running practice drills so everyone knows what to do.
Perpetrators of ransomware attacks are on the hunt for multiple ways to infiltrate your organization. A cloud-smart cybersecurity plan includes budgeting for and investing in the most up-to-date technology and training that you can afford. Get help from data and cloud security experts to help you navigate the complex world of cloud security. Your data will thank you for it – and so will your business.
The best way to face the threat of ransomware is head on, so get the facts and make a plan.
Visit ThinkOn solutions to learn about our Business Continuity outcomes.
1 Gartner. 2023. “Gartner Survey of Over 2,400 CIOs Reveals That 45% of CIOs are Driving a Shift to Co-Ownership of Digital Leadership.” https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2023-10-17-gartner-survey-of-over-2400-cios-reveals-that-45-percent-of-cios-are-driving-a-shift-to-co-ownership-of-digital-leadership
2 IMF. 2024. Fabio Natalucci, Mahvash S. Qureshi, Felix Suntheim. “Rising Cyber Threats Pose Serious Concerns for Financial Stability.” https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2024/04/09/rising-cyber-threats-pose-serious-concerns-for-financial-stability
3 Astra. 2023. Nivedita James Palatty. “100+ Ransomware Attack Statistics 2024: Trends & Cost.” https://www.getastra.com/blog/security-audit/ransomware-attack-statistics/
4 TechTarget. 2024. Sean Michael Kerner, “35 cybersecurity statistics to lose sleep over in 2024.” https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/34-Cybersecurity-Statistics-to-Lose-Sleep-Over-in-2020
5 Cyber Management Alliance. 2024. “Biggest Cyber Attacks, Data Breaches Ransomware Attacks: February 2024.” https://www.cm-alliance.com/cybersecurity-blog/biggest-cyber-attacks-data-breaches-ransomware-attacks-february-2024#cyberattacks
6 TechTarget. 2023. Saheed Oladimeji, Sean Michael Kerner, “SolarWinds hack explained: Everything you need to know.” https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/feature/SolarWinds-hack-explained-Everything-you-need-to-know
7 TechTarget. 2022. Sean Michael Kerner, “Colonial Pipeline hack explained: Everything you need to know.” https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/feature/Colonial-Pipeline-hack-explained-Everything-you-need-to-know
8 Cybersecurity Guide. 2024. “Fortifying digital defenses: Cybersecurity in the federal government.” https://cybersecurityguide.org/industries/government/
9 Comparitech. 2024. Mark Gill. “14 Shocking data loss and disaster recovery statistics.” https://www.comparitech.com/data-recovery-software/disaster-recovery-data-loss-statistics/
10 Ibid.