A Resilient Approach to Ransomware

“An infrastructure’s resiliency level has a direct connection to the economic impact of a disaster,” Ziv Kedem, Founder and Chief Executive Officer for Zerto, said in a recent Forbes article.

With organizations closing physical locations due to COVID-19 and many employees now working from home, wireless connectivity and data center operations are even more critical to keeping businesses running. Yet they face vulnerabilities in this new climate due to an ever-rising threat in the severity and frequency of ransomware attacks.

Ransomware Attacks—and Prevention Costs—Are Up

Ransomware incidents are up over 300%, and the estimated cost of attacks in the last year topped 11.5 billion. Present trends indicate the likelihood of an attack is now not a matter of if, but when.

The IDC State of IT Resilience Report, commissioned by Zerto, noted that companies pay a high financial and reputational cost for downtime caused by ransomware and other cyber threats. It reveals that 37% of respondents experienced a direct loss of revenue, 61% suffered damage to company reputation, and 26% indicated a permanent loss of customers. Ziv emphasizes that just “one hour of unplanned downtime can cost large enterprises up to $700,000.” Organizations require a solution that mitigates the risk and reduces the impact of downtime caused by cyberattacks.

In other recent research, conducted by Zerto at RSA’s 2020 Conference, findings showed a significant number of organizations do not back up their data or test their businesses continuity/disaster recovery (BC/DR) capabilities with enough frequency. As such, businesses across the world are introducing the risk of disruption and data loss in a world expecting 24/7 availability.

Ensuring Survival After Ransomware Breaches

Obviously, prevention alone is not the answer. Ziv noted the necessity of “a holistic plan of attack against inevitable ransomware breaches,” one that tries to “prevent the attack in the first place, but also ensures businesses continue to thrive if an attack makes its way through.”

The key is a backup solution that’s always on, with enough granularity to recover to a point in time precisely before the attack occurred. The Zerto IT Resilience Platform™ uses Continuous Data Protection to keep data protected in real time. If—and when—a cyberattack makes it past your defenses, your data can be recovered in seconds, with just a few clicks.

Zerto enables you to use network, journal, and IOPS statistics to determine the precise moment the ransomware became active and recover to within seconds before it happened. Zerto also allows you to quickly perform a failover test to see if you have the right point in time. If not, you can easily failover to a different point. And Zerto’s journal-based recovery lets you recover anything from just a few files to an entire application stack.

Surviving Ransomware with IT Resilience

With Zerto, your organization can gain the IT resilience needed to respond and recover immediately after ransomware attacks. The Zerto IT Resilience Platform goes beyond prevention to focus on holistic disaster recovery. Learn more about how you can confidently create a resilient response to cyberattacks today.