The ability to recover from a ransomware attack is as important to your business as building the best protection against it. This is even more so with the number of ransomware attacks on the rise.
Prepare your systems, people, data, and recovery process before an attack disrupts the business—and prove that clean recovery is possible before you need it.
Set clear targets for system restoration and acceptable data loss.
Use isolated, immutable recovery options that attackers cannot easily alter.
Practice recovery and make responsibilities clear before an incident.
Recovery is part of protection
What is ransomware?
Ransomware can encrypt files and systems, then demand payment for their release. Some attacks also exfiltrate information and threaten to expose or sell it, creating operational, legal, and reputational consequences.
Any organization that depends on connected technology can be affected. Education, healthcare, and financial institutions are frequent targets, but industry and company size do not eliminate the risk.
Recovery readiness
How quickly must systems return to operation? The lowest achievable RTO shapes the recovery architecture.
How much recent data could the business tolerate losing? The RPO determines how frequently data must be protected.
Can data and systems be restored into an isolated network for sanitization before reconnecting to production?
Are multiple recovery copies available, including a protected copy that cannot be modified or deleted?
Can the organization test disaster recovery without interrupting normal business operations?
Can an on-demand sandbox support system hardening, malware investigation, and data forensics?
Does protection extend across virtualized, cloud, container, SaaS, and traditional workloads?
Planning mistakes
Smaller organizations can be attractive because they often have fewer dedicated security and recovery resources.
Antivirus and anti-malware provide a basic defensive layer, but they cannot prevent every malicious download, stolen credential, or user mistake.
Ongoing training helps employees recognize phishing and other social-engineering attempts and respond appropriately.
Continuous data protection can provide more recovery points and reduce the amount of business data lost between backups.
Recovery plans, technology, personnel, and dependencies change. Testing should be regular enough to keep the plan trustworthy.
Cyber resilience
Map critical systems, data, workloads, dependencies, and existing recovery gaps.
Set RTO and RPO targets, then prepare isolated and immutable recovery options.
Test realistic scenarios so incident-response team members understand their roles and responsibilities.
Use test results and environmental changes to continuously strengthen the recovery plan.
Recovery planning
Client perspective
Build the plan before you need it
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