Ransomware Protection for Your Data

The continuing evolution of ransomware attacks requires innovative, protective solutions. Dell has led the protection of the data center with the Cyber Recovery solution, which is the only solution certified by Sheltered Harbor. It implements a digital air-gap solution that provides a dedicated replica isolated from the production environment. The isolation limits risks associated with remote threats identifying, accessing, and corrupting the backup data. In order to identify when a ransomware attack has occurred, Dell has partnered with Index Engines to monitor the backup data stream. CyberSense from Index Engines uses machine learning to identify changes in the backup data and alert when the appearance of an attack occurs.

I consult with companies from many markets that are scattered across the United States, and most of them had to pivot last year when the COVID pandemic hit. Scrambling for answers for a remote workforce, some were better prepared than others. Almost universally, they took budgets they had for things like data center and sank those funds into remote workforce initiatives. With the change in our work standards, we must define what our new “normal” is and determine what investments we should make in the core, edge, and cloud.

During this year of uncertainty and the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been many issues within schools, colleges, and universities globally on how to deliver student applications.

In today’s pandemic times, we are finding more and more customers and end users are working remotely from home. This requires users to access a number of devices, including laptops and tablets, while at home. Is this secure? Absolutely not.

Should the dreaded day that your organization suffers a ransomware attack arrive, the severity of the damage could vary from a simple file system encryption to a total lockout. Depending upon the misfortune your IT team is dealt with, the recovery process could possibly consist of a total wipe of the servers, storage, backups, especially critical systems, logical configurations, and property. The most difficult thing to swallow is when you thought you had everything covered in your disaster recovery or backup systems—only to find out the opposite is true.

Performance, Capacity, Scalability, Availability, Security, and Recoverability: These are all pillars of a multi-cloud data center strategy. In the past, applications were dependent on the on-premises data center infrastructure. “What you see is what you get” was pretty much how application developers had to deal with it. Today, the business dictates how an organization deploys data center resources to support an application. For a commercial business, the desire is for the application to generate significantly large amounts of data traffic that translates into revenue. For the public sector, it’s about getting information to and from the community at a rapid pace.

When employees were first sent to work from home, organizations scrambled to provide work-from-home software, devices, and infrastructure. As we transition to a new normal, it’s now important to reevaluate the initial infrastructure laid to support remote workers against a lasting, best-practice architecture. In the last entry, I shared the first three pillars for a thriving remote workforce. Let’s now explore the final three pillars.

Operating a remote workforce is no longer just a remote possibility. A work-from-home war is being quietly waged across many organizations throughout the country, as workers who were forced to quickly establish home office environments now wish to remain in their home rather than return to commuting to an office. This tipping point has deep and wide ramifications for organizations attempting to return to pre-COVID-19 productivity levels. 

I was recently asked by a colleague to build a portal to allow engineers to start and stop two Amazon EC2 instances that host software used for network discovery and mapping. The intent was to only have them running when necessary to reduce the cost of instances running when they are not in use.  Jokingly, I asked if he wanted me to build this portal on an EC2 instance. He didn’t catch the joke, so I explained that running one full-time instance to control two other instances was probably not going to be very effective at saving money.

Every 11 seconds, someone within the United States is infected with ransomware. That means that by the time you finish reading this blog post, almost 30 people will have their data locked and encrypted unless they pay a cybercriminal a ransom of hundreds or thousands of dollars (hopefully it’s not YOU!).