Backup Protection Best Practices Against Ransomware Attacks

Backups are the most effective means of protecting sensitive Microsoft 365 data. But even our backups aren’t safe from the dangers of the cyber world. Since hackers develop sophisticated methods to compromise backup systems, the responsibility of protecting backups falls on your shoulders.

A crucial step to creating the perfect backup strategy is to protect backups from ransomware and similar threats. Even businesses that follow proper backup best practices must find ways to secure physical storage devices and the cloud from malicious software. Therefore, companies must enforce best practices to secure their 365 enterprise backups from ransomware.

This guide will review these best practices and ensure ransomware attacks never threaten your backups. With all that said, let’s get into our ransomware backup strategy guide.

Have A Disaster Recovery Plan

Disaster Recovery, or DR, is essential for protecting critical data. Chances are, your organization has a disaster recovery plan in place. But you can take protection to another level by implementing a DR plan for your backups.

First, what is disaster recovery? Disaster recovery is a process that outlines how businesses must react whenever they come across a potential danger that could negatively impact business continuity.

DR plans include steps and methods to protect in case of cybersecurity breaches, hardware failure, and human error incidents. In addition, much of your DR plan must focus on backup protection against ransomware.

Your ransomware DR plan should include the following topics:

• What data should be backed up?
• How often should the data be backed up?
• Where will the data be backed up?
• How will the backups be protected?

These four topics will help you formulate an effective and consistent ransomware DR plan for your local and cloud backup.

Spread Your Backups Across Multiple Locations

An essential backup best practice is to spread your backups across multiple locations. This includes a local backup server and cloud-based data storage centers. But your local and cloud backups aren’t safe from ransomware corruption. That’s why you can modify your backup protection strategy to include offline or offsite storage for your most important data.

Offline storage is impossible to breach since it is disconnected from the internet and your network. The most common example of offline backup storage is a hard drive. You’re supposed to use the hard drive only when it’s time to migrate the backup to the drive. After the migration, disconnect the drive and secure it.

That way, you ensure ransomware attacks never get in contact with the data on the drive, essentially protecting your backups.

Educate Your Employees

Often the best way to protect against ransomware is by understanding how to identify and survive a ransomware attack. When formulating ransomware backup strategies, an important step is to teach employees how to secure backups properly.

The training program must emphasize the importance of backing up data using physical drives, cloud-based solutions, and an offsite location. These three steps will help your backup system survive any ransomware attack, as there will be more than one way to recover data in case of ransomware corruption.

Limit Access to Backups

Ransomware is a form of malware that preys on individuals in hopes of making a mistake in revealing sensitive data and passwords and downloading the malware itself. The human error element is precisely why even modern cybersecurity solutions fail to mitigate the dangers of ransomware attacks fully.

Simply put, you never know if an employee mistakenly opens a phishing email and downloads the malware onto their computer. So another backup protection best practice is to limit employee access to backups.

The correct way to approach this practice is only to allow a few administrators to access your backups. That way, you limit the number of employees with access to your backed-up data, thus limiting the risk of allowing an employee with stolen credentials access to your local backup servers.

Always Test Backups

It’s considered common practice to backup data regularly. But are you aware if your recovery methods are working? Your data is useless if you cannot recover it in a hasty manner. Therefore, the way to protect your backups is to test the recovery systems.

Ideally, businesses should go with a backup solution for data protection that can restore system access with a push of a button. But you’ll never know if the system in place is working if you don’t test it. Fortunately, you can always hire third-party services to test your backup and recovery process and ensure continuous access to data from critical systems.

Conclusion

Businesses use local and cloud storage for their backups. But these aren’t enough when facing a ransomware attack. Ransomware attacks can easily bypass your security measures and go steal your data.

The only way to protect against ransomware is to keep backups of your most important data. Therefore, this creates another problem, a problem that forces you to protect backups. Fortunately, you can do that by following these backup protection best practices.