Page 70 - Cyber Defense eMagazine September 2022

How Cloud-Based Services Minimize the Impact of

Incident Recovery

Few organizations are able to continue operating after being hit by ransomware, let alone be able
to quickly get services back online. Those few who can are likely assisted by cloud-based
services as those systems tend to remain unaffected.

By Jeff Chan, Technical Advisor, MOXFIVE

Recent data shows that nearly 70% of organizations now host more than half of their workloads in the
cloud, with overall cloud adoption growing 25% in the past year. With this increase in the adoption of
cloud-based services, organizations are well on their way to moving existing services from on-premises
to the cloud. One of the biggest and most notable benefits for organizations making this shift is that the
security risk and IT management gets transferred to the vendor. Organizations can significantly reduce
the amount of time they spend managing infrastructure, updating software, and upgrading hardware by
transferring these tasks to their vendor, who is then responsible for ensuring that services are up, systems
are updated, and Service License agreements (SLAs) are met. What’s more, cloud-based services can
provide a significant benefit when dealing with a ransomware incident.

In the event of a ransomware incident, cloud-based systems tend to be unaffected, since these services
and the servers hosting them are not running on the organization’s domain/network. In my experience,
only a few organizations have been able to continue operating even after being hit by ransomware or

Cyber Defense eMagazine – September 2022 Edition 70
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