by Nick Moss

Services Director

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Backup – a Critical Pillar of Incident Response

We live and breathe security at Saepio, so it’s quite fascinating for us that most new organisations we speak to have not conducted a Cyber Risk Assessment.  The 2021 UK Gov cyber survey states only 34% of businesses have.  For those that haven’t, it’s difficult for them to know how ready they are to respond to a cyber attack.

When Saepio are interviewing senior executives during the risk assessments we conduct, the most common concern is the threat of Ransomware and the organisation’s ability to quickly recover.  The National Cyber Security Centre’s (NCSC) Cyber Assessment Framework (CAF) cites backup as a critical element to protect against cyber-attacks as well as minimise the impact of an incident with an appropriate response and recovery strategy.

Protect and Minimise

 

It’s not just the CAF that highlights the importance of good backup in achieving cyber resilience.  You may have seen the latest iteration of the 10 steps to Cyber – https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/files/2021-10-steps-to-cyber-security-infographic.pdf.  Step 7 is Data Security and it specifically calls out:

  • Having confidence data is appropriately protected, wherever it is
  • Ability to restore important data and systems quicker with practised backups

So how do you gain confidence your data is appropriately protected and that backups can be quickly restored in the event of an incident?  A review or assessment is always a sensible place to start.  A common misconception is that cloud data is protected across SaaS applications.  Office 365 for example does not meet Gartner’s definition of backup. It offers limited recovery from ransomware or file corruption, which are some of the most worrisome threats.  Especially in regards to ransomware, recent cautions from the NCSC warns that file sync and share services, such as OneDrive are not immune to ransomware. Not only are they not isolated from the primary data, they are also based on synchronisation technology, which can lead to the spread of ransomware.

Without a thorough data protection strategy, you’ll run the risk of exposing your organisation to data loss, breaches, and internal attacks (including accidental deletion, ransomware and malicious insiders).  This can result in business continuity challenges as well as compliance and audit fines.

Saepio are advocates of managed public cloud solutions for data protection to tackle the challenges of traditional on premises backup in the light of the modern working world.  With the ability to scale on-demand and simple ‘pay for use’ models, they eliminate what’s known as stranded capacity and leaves predictable ongoing costs.  You also step out of the role of integrator and builder of basic infrastructure services and into one where applications and services are aligned more closely to business outcomes.  And very importantly to Saepio, cloud backup solutions are security ready, with security built in, addressing regional access and compliance issues, with air gapped backups and zero trust access controls giving true data integrity.

Contact Us

Contact Us

If you’d like to understand any of the above in more detail, Saepio are on hand to guide you through the process from start to finish. Simply call us on +44 (0) 1494 216 061 or drop us an email on contact@saepio.co.uk.