Cybersecurity Awareness Month: How to Protect, Detect & Recover

If you work in a large organization, there’s always a chance that someone’s going to click the wrong link or download the wrong file, unleashing a ransomware attack that could take down your business for days, weeks, or longer. This human factor is critical, so we were glad to see that this year’s Cybersecurity Awareness Month, an annual government-led initiative, is focusing on the people part of the equation.

As our CTO wrote in a recent Forbes article: “Ransomware aims for people.”

 
This is especially important in the era of hybrid work. File data is a common target for hackers because it’s critical to most businesses. Plus, there’s a lot of it – unstructured file data makes up more than 80% of all data in the enterprise. Now that more and more people are accessing their files from home and remote locations, the attack surface has broadened, and there are more potential weak points. At Nasuni, we recognize that there is no perfect defense, and our ransomware tools are designed to ensure that if an attack happens, you can get your business back up and running again as quickly as possible.
 

Our ransomware strategy has three essential strengths.

1. Protect your files forever
File data protection is built into the Nasuni File Data Platform. Files are automatically versioned to the cloud, where they’re stored as immutable objects. There’s no limit to the number of objects, so our customers have a near-infinite number of recovery points. That means organizations can store unlimited, immutable snapshots for as long as they’re needed in low-cost cloud object storage, allowing them to recover from ransomware attacks that have been lying in wait for weeks or months.

2. Detect the latest threats
Our latest innovation in the fight against ransomware is the Nasuni Ransomware Protection add-on service, which delivers in-line detection of live ransomware attacks with up-to-date intelligence on the latest variants. We’ve been leading the way on the recovery front for a while now, but we learned early on that the quicker an organization can identify and quarantine a ransomware attack, and understand exactly which files and folders need to be recovered, the easier it will be for them to get the business up and running normally again.

The Jerde Partnership appreciates the new Nasuni service for exactly that reason. “When we were hit by a ransomware attack, it took some time to investigate and finally triage the issue,” recalls Joe Marando, chief information officer at The Jerde Partnership. “When you go through something like this and it’s not immediately clear how extensive the attack is, you go into alarm mode. Knowing that Nasuni is taking the burden off my team by ensuring ransomware attacks are detected as they happen with detailed logging to help us laser in on the attack means that we can isolate the threat right away and get to the point of recovery more quickly.”

3. Recover millions of files in seconds
The recovery phase is where the Nasuni platform truly differentiates itself. If you rely on the data protection solutions from backup vendors, then IT might need days or even weeks to restore healthy versions of files. But Nasuni allows you to recover millions of files in seconds, across any number of sites. Your users may not even miss a beat.

Another one of our customers, the leading restaurant brand TGI Fridays, is a highly security-conscious organization, but as Infrastructure Team Lead Michael Oehlert points out, all it takes is one person making one little mistake for malware to slip past. Yet Nasuni protects them against that human error.

“The number one advantage of the Nasuni platform for me was the ransomware recovery,” Oehlert says. “The Nasuni approach is very efficient. We can go into the file directories, step back in time and recover individual files or entire volumes. I can recover from a ransomware event in a matter of hours, or probably less.”

This brings us back to the theme of this month’s national cybersecurity campaign — people. Ultimately, it’s not just about the people who mistakenly allow the malware inside the perimeter. We also need to think about the people who are charged with getting everything up and running again after the attack. Nasuni gives IT leaders like Marando, Oehlert and others the tools to protect their files and their business, allowing them to enjoy that all-too-rare IT phenomenon known as peace of mind.