COmpany Articles > Disaster Recovery
by Kevin Wood

ransomware attacks not only about data

Extortion by holding data hostage

The typical goal with any ransomware attack is to infiltrate a network and see what information – data – they can get out of it.  When the hackers find data – either in documents, databases or emails – that contains sensitive information which can be used as leverage, they get to work.  

Hackers download data – sometimes terabytes of data, whatever they can get their hands on – and export it to a remote location, masked by multiple layers of VPN’s.  After they get the data they want, they deliver the ransomware of their choosing and “detonate” it, running it on the company network.  To cement their position, most ransomware variants are not picky and will scour a network and encrypt any documents they can find.

The problem for a lot of companies is the lack of proper backups or a proper backup and recovery solution, as well as “offline” or off-site backups.  When a hacker infiltrates their systems, they’re affecting the live server as well as the backup server on-site.  Without proper cloud backups, where data is stored in secure data centers, and can be easily replicated across other locations, they are at the mercy of hackers.

In a recent study of 600 companies, only 16% of the companies reported that they were able to successfully recover all of their data from the hackers.  On the other hand, a shocking 84% of companies reported that they could only recoup part of their data.  This was due in part to poor disaster recovery planning, and partially because the hackers used this as leverage to get more money.  Hackers have been known to accept payments and then release some of the data and then extort the company for more money to get more data.  

Of the 600 companies, 85% of them experienced additional extortion attempts by the hackers, and 57% actually paid the additional fee in hopes of getting all of their data back.  Unfortunately, there isn’t some heroic “Hacker Code” that hackers abide by and you’re normally at the whim of the attacker.  The study was designed to investigate the impacts of ransomware and find ways to better approach the situation. 

At Balance Business Group (BBG), we pride ourselves on our Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) platform that has revolutionized the industry.  Simply having backup software that stores backups on a tape drive or storage device is no longer sufficient.  Backing up to the cloud has quickly become an important factor in saving data off-site, but there’s something more that sets us apart that has become crucial – the ability to restore to an online datacenter, without restrictions, for an unlimited amount of time without an extra cost.

There are a lot of backup solutions out there, some free, some expensive but the common feature among all of them that is missing is the ability to restore to the cloud.  If it is offered, there’s always some extra cost, either in the amount of data or the time you can keep your servers on “their datacenters”.  Instead of incurring this additional cost, a lot of companies have provisions in their Disaster Recovery Plan that require data drives, tapes, any firewalls or servers be moved to another location so they can be spun up again.  Other companies don’t even have this option and in the event of a cyber-attack are shut down until they can recover and bring systems back online.

The days of being offline for days, weeks or months are over when you’ve implemented our DRaaS solution.  Backups can be taken and stored on-site, or they can be stored in the cloud like any service.  In the event of a cyber-attack, you could restore from backups on-site.  However, and this is what sets us apart, in the event of a severe cyber-attack (like a ransomware attack), or a natural disaster that damages your company headquarters, instead of worrying about it, you can restore all of your servers to the cloud (data centers) and keep them there as long as you need.  No extra cost, no fee’s later on – it’s all included in your rate.  This includes unlimited testing too.  Just point your firewalls to our data centers and you’ll be back to work in no time.

Let me rephrase that.  If you have a disaster where you can’t run anything at your current location and need to move off-site, you don’t need to stress – your data and applications will be there, and you won’t have to pay extra.  Using our Orchestration tool, you can setup your entire recovery environment – you define what servers start up and when.  If you have specific applications that need to be running before we mark the server as “up and running”, you can be very granular in the setup to ensure your environment will come up without any issues. 

When disaster strikes, and you need to get up and running quickly, open Orchestration and click “Run”.  That’s it.  

Our engineers spend as much time as needed during implementation to ensure that backup and recovery operations are configured exactly how you want them.  We make sure that if you have to click “Run” in a real disaster, you’ll be confident that everything will come up as expected.  We don’t gouge you to pay for the services and we don’t require you to pay more.  How horrible would that be to in the midst of a disaster and get the note that you need to pay more to restore online so you can running while you investigate and/or recover from a disaster.

If you’ve questioned your Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) in the past, you’ve had conversations with others in your organization about your DRP, or maybe you have never even thought of it at all, we should talk.  Our team has decades of years of experience in disaster recovery, cyber-security and data analytics.  We specialize in this – we live and breath it every day and want to empower as many companies as we can with a DRaaS solution that meets their needs.

To get a conversation started, click the “Contact Us” button below and send an email to our Team.  We’ll schedule a meeting with the business owner and managing partner, and engineer(s), and members of your team to discuss how our DRaaS solution would make sense in your organization.  

In a recent study of 600 companies, only 16% of the companies reported that they were able to successfully recover all of their data from the hackers.