Credit: Webroot
The last 18 months has been a sea-change in the way we work, with work from home and hybrid working conditions becoming the new normal. As a result, the core of an organisation’s security strategy has moved beyond the corporate firewall and into the home office.
In the past, discussions about business continuity have all been about the mid-size and enterprise, but that’s now shifted to include the small and medium sized business market – as well as people from businesses of all sizes now working from home.
Accompanying this shift has been an accelerated digital transformation in the way we do business. There’s been a proliferation of cloud tools – including Microsoft 365, storage and collaboration – as individuals and organisations alike scrambled to get work done in the early days of the pandemic. Time wore on and we’ve arrived at a new digitalized reality often without having taken the time to revisit the security and long-term feasibility of our (seemingly) short-term fixes.
This proliferation of cloud tools, and therefore data, means that it’s paramount to protect data anywhere and everywhere it may live. And part of that protection means having a solid backup plan in place.
What does cyber resilience mean, and how does backup fit in?
Cyber resilience is all about a business having the ability to deliver on its goals and to its customers, regardless of any cyber event impacting it. It effectively brings together cyber security and business continuity, along with the organisational resilience needed to maintain operations.
Backup is key to cyber resilience in enabling business to be able to recover quickly from a cyberattack like ransomware, where the data is encrypted until a fee is paid to unlock it. Other reasons for needing a solid backup strategy include unplanned outages, along with hardware failure.
MSPs and Resellers can reap the benefits of the trends of protecting customers from the edge to the cloud with Carbonite + Webroot end-to-end protection and data security solutions through a single vendor. Many have started the journey to consolidate vendors to help lower operational costs and improve efficiencies with integrated solutions optimized for virtual and hybrid environments.
As part of any cyber resilience strategy, Carbonite can aid business continuity efforts with three backup tools – Carbonite Endpoint Protection, Carbonite Backup for Microsoft 365, and Carbonite Server. Let’s take a closer look to see how these solutions can enable your cyber resilience strategy.
Protection for great control and efficiency
With so many of us outside the office, the user’s device becomes the perimeter an organisation must protect if it wants to maintain a resilient cyber posture. Forty per cent of company data resides on user devices, and having a backup solution such as Carbonite Endpoint Protection safeguards this data against both loss and duplication to make the backup process more efficient.
Protection is also delivered when a device is lost or stolen using inbuilt location services to identify the device’s last known location. Because a lost device is a potential compromise, advanced features like a ‘poison pill’ which completely wipes the drive clear, will render the device useless to criminals. Devices are also protected from cybercriminals offering a granular restore, timed at 15-minute intervals where if there is a cyber event, the most recent data is resurrected.
Additional backup features include a legal hold where if the device must be locked down for any reason, data is preserved at the file level with AES 256-bit encryption.
Why we need to back up Microsoft 365
With remote working coming to the fore, many organisations now depend on Microsoft 365 to maintain business productivity. However, a common misconception with MS365, is that Microsoft will take responsibility for data loss. It doesn’t. The responsibility for data loss resides with customers with their licensing agreement revealing MS365 customers should use third-party backup solutions.
One local managed service provider in Australia using Carbonite Backup for Microsoft 365 is SIAX Computing solutions who manages around 3000 endpoints for a variety of SMBs. Its chief operations officer, Milan Maricic, says since deploying the backup solution for M365, operations which took long periods of time, such as file recovery, have fallen to a ten-minute window.
“Deployment was easy and painless,” he said. “We were able to scale our Carbonite Backup for Microsoft 365 to greater than 1000 seats in the first two months.”
Maricic said his technical team loves the clarity of reporting, the ease of troubleshooting and the proactive management associated with the solution.
Server backup for cloud, on-premise and hybrid environments
Server backup can be complex and challenging across different platform and environments often increasing costs and resources. An enterprise-grade server backup solution like Carbonite Server can cover 200 operating systems and 200 applications. The flexibility to backup physical or virtual servers, with onsite servers getting access to data compression, has the capability to reduce file sizes by between 40 and 60 per cent. Businesses can confidently reduce their RTO by optimising their backup projects to achieve higher operational efficiency while reducing bandwidth costs and disk utilisation, all through a central management console.
Backup is a critical part of any cyber resilience strategy, and with Carbonite’s offerings - Carbonite Endpoint Protection, Carbonite Backup for Microsoft 365, and Carbonite Server – partners are assured they have a solution covering everything from the end user devices to the server room.
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