How to Protect Backup from Ransomware: Ultimate Guide

As digitalization improves the productivity of business, its vulnerability also becomes a potential risk to companies. The various business systems work together to make everything go in order before being infected by ransomware.

Business managers might be afraid of it and have some questions like whether data backup helps save the business from ransomware, whether the backup will be infected, and how to protect backup from ransomware.

What is ransomware attack?

Ransomware is a type of malicious software that invades the victim’s IT system and encrypts data unless a ransom is paid, usually in the form of cryptocurrency.

IT appliances often get infected by ransomware because users click the malicious links or attachments in emails or the infected website.

After the first appliance gets infected, ransomware will gradually infect the other appliances. If the data is encrypted, the company’s business systems will be stopped and so will the production.

Some companies pay the ransom and get the key to unlock the data; some also pay the ransom but doesn’t get the key; some can’t recover data with the key; some doesn’t pay the ransom but procure ransomware recovery solution; some clean ransomware and directly recover data from backup; the last thing that the owner would like to face is that there is no data backup and the data is irrecoverable.

Why protect backup from ransomware?

Recovering the infected IT environment from data backup is a cost-effective solution since data backup is the daily job of IT administrator and it is often generated automatically.

However, backup should be used properly to defend ransomware attack because the backup itself could also be infected, even if the backup is encrypted.

Many small businesses get closed after being infected with ransomware and making and protecting data backup is an affordable ransomware protection.

How to protect backup from ransomware?

You can protect your business in various ways.

1. Have an offsite backup copy

Usually, if the backup is stored in the same environment where the IT appliances are infected, it will also be infected so you can save a copy of the backup in another storage in advance to isolate the backup from the production environment.

According to 3-2-1 backup rule, you should have a backup copy in case the local backup is not available so you can build a secondary datacenter to store the backup or deploy the same IT environment to recover business system in an emergency.

The public cloud is also another kind of offsite storage an it takes less money to store the backup copy in the cloud than building another datacenter.

2. Enhance the level of ransomware protection

Backup is also part of data in the whole environment, so to prevent backup data from being infected by ransomware, it is necessary to do every ransomware protection method for it because the general methods also apply to protect the backup data.

●Keep the related software up-to-date to prevent ransomware attacks exploiting outdated vulnerabilities.

●Implement strong security measures to backup storage and applications such as password protection, access controls, and encryption.

●Train the related employees to increase their consciousness of ransomware protection and equip their knowledge and skills to identify and respond to potential ransomware attacks.

3. Use the professional ransomware protection solution

Except for carefully preventing ransomware by yourself, you can also install ransomware protection software to defend the ransomware attacks with an extra layer of security.

Some software will monitor the whole environment, detect suspicious activities, and block unauthorized access attempts. With real-time alerts and notifications, it is easy to know the condition of the whole environment.

Some software will directly protect the backup storage to make it immutable so you will have the uninfected backup data when it is needed.

How to make backup immutable to ransomware with Vinchin?

Vinchin Backup & Recovery is a professional enterprise backup solution for multiple virtualization platforms like VMware vSphere, Hyper-V, XenServer, XCP-ng, RHV, oVirt, OLVM, OpenStack, etc., and other applications and appliances like databases, physical server, NAS.

Except for backing up the applications and appliances, Vinchin Backup & Recovery can also help prevent the backup data from being infected by ransomware. You just need to enable Storage Protection in a user-friendly web console.

Expand System > select System Settings > click Storage Security

With Storage Protection enabled, only Vinchin applications have the permission to write new data and modify existing data within the storage attached to VInchin backup server so that the backup storage is safe from malicious attacks, ransomware and other malware.

Note: It only works with direct-attached storage on Vinchin backup server, so for the network-attached storage like CIFS/NFS shares, storage protection is not applicable.

Vinchin Backup & Recovery has been selected by thousands of companies and you can also start a 60-day full-featured free trial here. Also, contact us, leave your requirements, and then you will receive your tailored solution. We have established partnerships with reputable companies all over the world so if you would like to do a local business, you can select a local partner here.

Sum Up

Backup is one of the effective solutions to recover the production environment from ransomware but it also needs to be protected to make sure there is valid data backup for recovery. You can protect backup from ransomware by keeping a backup in the remote site or the cloud, enhancing the level of ransomware protection to backup storage and applications, and installing professional ransomware protection software.

Vinchin Backup & Recovery can help backup VM, database, physical server, NAS and also protect the backup data by making it immutable to ransomware. Don’t miss the free trial.