The last year or two have created an ideal storm for ransomware. With shutdowns, companies responded by moving more applications and services online so their customers quickly, employees and partners could continue conducting business. This created more opportunities for ransomware criminals to focus on, and ransomware itself transformed from something hard to build up into easier things such as ransomware-as-a-service.

This has created a significant headache, and way to obtain sleeplessness, for this management. No IT professional wants their company to be tomorrow’s latest ransomware headline news story. Together with your most significant business applications especially, which if brought down will cripple your organization for an unknown timeframe.

The other thing to bear in mind is that ransomware criminals aren’t software companies that care deeply concerning the quality of these software. In the event that you pay the ransom even, and obtain the decryption keys, will the decryption work? And can it work within an acceptable time frame?

But not all of the news about ransomware is bad news!

Cisco and veeam have very good news for you. With best-of-breed ransomware prevention tools from Cisco, and best-of-breed ransomware recovery tools from Veeam, a ransomware could be developed by you recovery plan which will allow to create ransomware infection significantly less likely, and ransomware recovery a lot more performant and reliable.

You’ll be able to displace the anxiety about being another ransomware headline with the confidence you could get over an attack with reduced disruption.

FlashStack critical business applications

FlashStack is really a joint solution from Cisco and Pure Storage created for your critical business applications with powerful and uptime requirements. FlashStack is really a rigorously tested and validated architecture that combines Cisco server and networking gear with Pure Storage all-flash storage. The output of the testing and validation is really a Cisco Validated Design (CVD). The CVD for FlashStack provides step-by-step instructions on how best to implement FlashStack in customer environments.

Modern Data Protection – A lot more than just backup

Your critical business applications, and their data, running on FlashStack require Modern Data Protection. Modern Data Protection is a lot a lot more than just backup and recovery ( Figure 1 ), it offers other critical services like data security, disaster recovery (DR), and cloud mobility. Modern Data Protection must enable our customers to possess their data where it really is needed by them, when it’s needed by them, whether that’s on premises, in the general public cloud, or leveraging a managed services provider (MSP).

The risk of ransomware

To utilize dramatic, but appropriate, language – ransomware is really a disaster. As you can plainly see in Figure 2 , the expense of ransom itself is really a fraction of the entire cost of the attack. No can companies hope they won’t be targeted by ransomware criminals longer; they need to build strong ransomware protection and also have a tested ransomware recovery plan.

Veeam completes Cisco ransomware protection story

Strong ransomware protection must include not merely proactive defenses, but a validated recovery plan also.

Cisco’s security products provide best-of-breed layers of defense to avoid ransomware attacks from getting to your data. As you can see in figure 3 , Cisco Secure Email can offer inbound email inspection to filter malicious email; Cisco Umbrella and Secure Endpoint can prevent user actions from infecting computers and will let you know when an attack started, what lengths it’s spread and what systems were impacted, letting you target recovery; Cisco Secure Access by Duo can offer strong multi-factor authentication to avoid attackers from compromising accounts; and Cisco Identity Services Engine can prevent attackers from moving over the systems in your network laterally.

But you must arrange for the contingency that the attackers will penetrate all of your defenses and encrypt your production data alongside disabling or destroying vulnerable backups.

Veeam ransomware protection, from detection to immutability

At Veeam, that contingency is referred by us plan as a ransomware recovery plan. You can find two critical elements this course of action must have:

1. 1. Valid, usable backup copies which are safe from the attack

1. 1. Fast recovery because the recovery needs may be extensive

As we will dsicover, Veeam can help you with the initial part, and Cisco can help with the second.

Veeam gets the most comprehensive ransomware protection capabilities in the info protection industry. Veeam can make sure that your backup data is not disabled or destroyed by leveraging what we call “ultra-resilient” backup media. This is immutable, offline or air-gapped storage for both on-premises and the off-site copies of one’s backups.

Veeam customers can verify the recoverability of backups with SureBackup jobs automatically. SureBackup jobs can leverage Veeam Secure Restore, that allows one to scan your supported machines for ransomware or virus threats using today’s anti-malware signatures, with day zero infections in order to detect any machines which were backed up. Secure Restore could also be used when recovering data to make sure that you don’t reinfect “cleanroom” environments.

Veeam ONE, Veeam’s monitoring and analytics product, can detect suspicious ransomware behavior for a genuine number of scenarios, including if the production machines commence to exhibit behavior in keeping with a ransomware infection, or if how big is an incremental backup changes dramatically. If Veeam ONE detects these kinds of behaviors, it’ll alert the IT security and backup administrators, and it may take action to support the infection even, like disabling the network interfaces on those machines.

For a comprehensive set of Veeam’s secure backup capabilities to safeguard against ransomware, please follow this link .

The second critical component of a ransomware recovery plan is usually to be in a position to rapidly recover huge amounts of data. Cisco UCS storage servers, just like the S3260 and the C240 All-Flash ( Figure 4 ) can offer both high-speed backup and high-speed recovery, and so are ideal backup storage choices if you are creating a strong ransomware recovery plan.

Cisco, Pure Storage and Veeam collaborated on the Veeam Data Protection for FlashStack CVD . The CVD includes the full total results from both backup and recovery tests of the UCS S3260 and C240 All-Flash.

It’s been our experience that customers pay the ransom since they believe it’s faster and easier than restoring the info from backup since they treat detection and recovery as siloed processes. Companies who build a built-in security architecture shall be capable of see when an attack began, identify patient zero, know very well what systems were impacted and also recover faster and much more reliably making not paying the ransom a good choice.

There’s one final little bit of good news to talk about, which is that customers that build strong ransomware recovery plans don’t need to pay criminals the ransom. They are able to recover with reduced disruption with their customers, employees and partners; and spend much less overall than customers that not have a solid ransomware recovery plan.

Finally, some bad news for the ransomware criminals!