Ransomware is a key challenge for modern IT teams. While organizations are constantly improving their technology and their security measures, so too are malicious parties and hackers. On top of this, many businesses are creating additional exposure points due to the need to distribute data and apps across many locations.
In light of these dynamic conditions, IT decision-makers must continue to explore innovative strategies to defend against the escalating threat of ransomware attacks.
Key Takeaways:
- Ransomware is a form of malicious programming that essentially takes computer systems hostage, but organizations can defend themselves by taking preventative and restorative measures.
- Unified storage is one way to prevent ransomware attacks by fortifying stored data with built-in detection and blocking.
- Immutable backups allow for secure recovery from a ransomware attack by ensuring that redundant instances of data cannot be altered by malicious parties.
What IT Leaders Need To Know About How To Defend Against Ransomware Attacks
Ransomware is a form of malicious software that infiltrates a computer system and then either encrypts the data therein so that the user cannot access it or wrests away control of the system outright. The party responsible for distributing the ransomware is then in a position to make demands in exchange for returning the data or system to its owner.
The ransomware threat is real, especially for business organizations that manage sensitive internal data as well as personal information about clients and partners. A hacker might attempt to insert a ransomware package via a phishing attack, malicious email, vulnerability exploits, or other methods to infiltrate the target system with the ransomware, even if antivirus software is present.
What IT leaders need to know about how to defend against ransomware attacks is that protection is a never-ending cycle of preventing, detecting, and recovering from threats. Zero-trust security measures go a long way toward reducing the likelihood of an attempted attack, comprehensive monitoring can pick up anomalous activity within seconds, and having a recovery plan can ensure business continuity even if a breach does occur.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency recommends a few ransomware prevention best practices that all organizations should follow, such as identifying assets that are searchable via online tools and maintaining continuous diagnostics and mitigation training.
In addition to these and other standard methods of defending against ransomware attacks, IT decision-makers looking to fortify their organizations in 2024 can take advantage of the latest advancements in security and cloud technology.
Fortify Clouds and Datacenters With Unified Storage
When enterprise leaders ask how to defend against ransomware attacks, it is a question of how to protect data. Data exists in storage, and many storage processes today are running in the cloud.
Unified storage is a solution that effectively creates a data fortress capable of protecting against ransomware attacks in the cloud. It is a software-defined approach that brings the benefits of traditional shared storage while also consolidating block and file services in such a way that enables integrated ransomware protection.
Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) is a data services platform available to organizations operating in the Nutanix ecosystem. It simplifies enterprise data storage operations by way of flexibly providing data services at any datacenter, cloud, or edge location without compromising on ransomware protection or scalability.
For further insights into data existing on a unified storage platform, Files Storage enables centralized management, scalability, and adaptability to all file storage locations. Even across multiple clouds, Files Storage allows data admins to automate operations and deploy storage updates in minutes while also safeguarding files with alerts that detect ransomware and other security threats.
Data Lens is yet another tool in the Nutanix environment that showcases how to defend against ransomware attacks. Data Lens integrates additional layers of data security and analytics into NUS, providing anomaly detection and more ransomware detection features that keep data in distributed clouds safe.
Strengthen Disaster Recovery With Immutable Backups
Backup and disaster recovery (DR) are essential parts of any organization’s security strategy, entailing the copying of data to separate locations such that IT teams can restore operations if the original data source becomes compromised. Immutable backups are arguably the best defense against ransomware due to the nature of these backups making them inalterable, either by administrators or by hackers or ransomware programs.
Data DR with Nutanix ensures immutable backup and complete recovery with speed that is only possible on a platform that eliminates IT silos that otherwise impede replication and restoration from distributed recovery points. Without an efficient recovery plan, organizations face the possibility of losing valuable data assets and failing to meet increasingly high service-level expectations.
Disaster recovery is further strengthened by the presence of Objects Storage as a scalable storage solution ideal for backup scenarios. Leveraging the Objects Storage tool answers the question of how to defend against ransomware attacks by ensuring compliance and data protection through data fidelity and immutability as inherent features.
Immutable backups lead to reliable DR plans that can consistently meet predefined recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives. With Nutanix Disaster Recovery, it is possible to simply deploy a strategy for recovering from a ransomware threat to any location without ever toeing the line of breaching service-level agreements.
Never Again Wonder How To Defend Against Ransomware Attacks
Ransomware protection starts with a simple cycle of prevention, detection, and recovery, but a comprehensive defense requires adopting more advanced technologies suitable for the cloud-native future ahead. By leveraging secure storage options and security tools that are built into the Nutanix platform and accessible with push-button simplicity, IT leaders get all the ransomware protection solutions they may ever need.
Nutanix aims to strengthen cyber resilience and ransomware protection for the foreseeable future. To that end, new features are coming to Data Lens and Nutanix Unified Storage, including:
- Expedited ransomware detection and blocking
- One-click ransomware recovery
- Permission visibility and risk visualization
“With these new ransomware detection and recovery features, the Nutanix Cloud Platform provides built-in ransomware protection, data visibility and automated data governance for Nutanix Files and Objects across clouds to simplify data protection and strengthen an organization’s cyber resilience posture,” said Thomas Cornely, SVP of Product Management at Nutanix, in a recent press release.
The reality of the IT landscape today is that data and applications are anywhere and everywhere. The matter of how to defend against ransomware attacks becomes more complicated as data proliferates across so many locations, but the answer everyone is looking for already exists.
Learn more about other datacenter risk management processes as well as enterprise-wide data protection for CIOs.
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