Lindy Cameron, the chief executive of the UK's National Cyber Security Centre, warned that ransomware is the most immediate cyber security threat to UK business. In a speech at Chatham House, the CEO marked a year into her tenure looking back on key learnings from the past year and stressing that not enough companies routinely plan and prepare for ransomware, and have confidence their cyber security and contingency planning could withstand a major incident.
Top 5 areas of IT risk within your business
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What is ransomware?
Ransomware involves ‘tricking’ end users into visiting a website which leads to the running of software designed to encrypt the recipient’s files. Criminals involved in this activity often bribe their victims or the organisations they work for into paying large sums of money (or Bitcoins) in order to unencrypt or release their own data.
How can organisations tackle ransomware?
A collective approach that encompasses organisational cyber resilience and government capability is the most effective way to counter cyber criminals and ransomware more specifically.
The vast majority of high-profile cyber incidents can be prevented by following
actionable steps that dramatically improve an organisation’s cyber resilience. Adhering to backup best-practice should be a priority for all organisations. Wavex regularly use Azure Cloud Backup as a core component of our recommended risk mitigation strategy.
Benefits of backing up data with Azure Cloud Backup
Secure and highly available
Azure Cloud Backup services stores three copies of your data in three different locations in the Azure data centre and another three copies in an Microsoft Azure data centre in a remote location. Data is encrypted before it leaves your data centre, sent over a secure connection to Azure, and stored encrypted in Azure.
Reduces unnecessary costs
Azure Cloud Backup services gives you the flexibility to pick and choose the data you want to protect, for as long as you want to protect it. Backup is designed to be a cost effective IT solution whether you’re interested in short or long-term retention. And, you can restore virtual machines or individual files and folders – in Azure or on-premises – as needed, for free.
Deploys easily
Use
Backup in Azure and on-premises, and with Windows, Linux, VMware and Hyper-V. Backup automatically detects your on-premises VMware virtual machines and connects them to Azure. Three clicks and your Azure VMs are backed up. As all your backup information is in a central dashboard, you can quickly decide what you need to restore if you unexpectedly lose data. With just a few clicks, you can export Power Business Intelligence reports about your backups – making compliance easy.
Protects against ransomware
Set up limited access control so only your authorised users can perform critical backup operations. You will get a notification if Backup detects any suspicious activity – before your data is compromised. Any unauthorised deletions of your backups will be kept for days, to give you time to secure your environment and start the recovery process.
