Page 113 - Cyber Defense eMagazine April 2023

Stop Backing Up Ransomware

By James Gorman, Cyber Security Expert and Entrepreneur

When utilizing cloud technology for workloads, companies often assume that their current backup
strategy is sufficient for the cloud environment. However, having good backups has been a basic form of
Cyber and IT resilience for over 35 years. While many IT organizations have established a backup
strategy in the past, they have yet to adapt it to address new technologies and emerging threats.

Many organizations store their backups on media storage on-site or off-site storage, cloud-based storage,
or another company-managed facility. However, as these traditional strategies and legacy solutions
migrate to critical cloud-based workloads, they may need to be more suitable to ensure the resilience
and recovery of cloud-based workloads. The cloud operates differently than traditional on-premise
systems in that it is programmable, ephemeral, and on-demand, requiring a different approach to backup
strategies to ensure the resilience and recovery of cloud-based workloads. Legacy backups can present
a problem when migrating to the cloud, and they are not designed to be cloud-native and may need to
be more effective in detecting and removing cyber threats and corruption. Restoring and testing these
backups can be time-consuming and disruptive to daily operations. A corrupted backup can cause

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