Should your infrastructure have a backup solution apart from an Antivirus? That is a very simple question with a straightforward answer, yes! Because both products protect your environment differently.
Why Antivirus is required?
Antivirus protects your infrastructure from outside threats, but they are not 100% bulletproof. And it would be best if you had a disaster recovery plan to restore all your data when you lose that data. That is when a backup tool is needed.
Antivirus only prevents and removes malicious software from your systems and does not prevent or protect against data loss.
Antivirus provides you protection against online security threats like ransomware or other viruses but doesn’t protect or prevent data loss when you are already infected.
We know that Antivirus are not 100% reliable. If Antivirus does not protect your data, you always need to restore your data. Hackers and viruses are always one step ahead of any protection.
A backup tool doesn’t protect your infrastructure against ransomware, worms, or virus but saves your data against data loss triggered by an attack. Antivirus cannot restore any data if you have an attack with data loss.
These are some examples type of threats that your Antivirus protects and defends your infrastructure:
- Ransomware
- Adware
- Worms
- Trojan horses
- Virus
- File infectors
- Rootkits
- Browser hijackers
- Keyloggers
All the above threats are critical dangers to your organization’s infrastructure. Your organization should have a proper Enterprise Antivirus to defend and protect your infrastructure. Not only will it protect your data, but it also secures your data from external access(even if you don’t have data loss).
Organizations must protect all devices and data against all classes of malware; this cannot be done by your Backup tool.
How does Antivirus work?
Antivirus software checks any incoming emails, computer programs, and files against their know type of malware. Since new viruses are created daily, the Antivirus tool must be updated.
It depends on the type of Antivirus that you have(including your emails), it may include detection, monitoring, and continuously scans for any malware or virus in your systems.
When a threat is identified, Antivirus can delete, isolate or quarantine the file(s) or any affected data, making it inaccessible and removing the risk to your systems.
Why is Backup and Recovery Important?
First, Antivirus tools can’t restore or recover your data. In the event of an attack that your Antivirus did not protect, your data and systems are lost. The only tool that can restore all your data is a backup tool.
Your backup tool can restore all the data in hours with a minimum data loss(depending on your RTO and RPO).
You can then have your systems up and running free of any ransomware, worms, or threats that triggered the attack.
Following the Backup rule 3-2-1 and having a good backup plan is the first step to restoring your data easier and faster.
You can reduce your data loss by using a proper Backup Plan for your Virtual or physical environment. Always use the rule 3-2-1 for your Backups.
When using a Backup tool like Vembu BDR, you should use these options for 3-2-1 rules and offsite backups or backups to Cloud.
3-2-1 rule: 3 copies of your data, 1 copy on-site/main repository, 2 copy different media type(like rotation tapes), 3 copy off-site.
Note: For better safety, you can use a 4th copy to the Cloud or use Cloud copy as your 3rd backup copy.
Today, other backup strategies like 3-2-1-1-0 or 4-3-2 can also be implemented with the new technologies, Multi-Cloud, and other options. But detailing and discussing those options can be done in a different article.
An example of the Backup 3-2-1 rule and how backups works:
Retaining multiple copies of encrypted backups in different locations provides the insurance and flexibility to restore to a point in time not affected by data corruption or malicious attacks.
With some of the new ransomware encrypting all your infrastructure, including backups, a good backup plan is critical, including using immutable Storage and Backups for complete protection of your backups.
A backup tool is used to restore data during disasters like floods or fires. But a backup tool is not only to be used when you have data loss from an external attack. Antivirus tools can’t help or protect you in these cases since it is not able to restore your infrastructure.
A backup tool is used to restore any data loss. It can be an entire infrastructure, some critical data deleted from a server, a computer, emails, or any other device, or data backed up by your backup tool.
Conclusion:
Antivirus or a Backup tool? The correct answer is both because both tools are complementary to each other.
A good antivirus software tool is your best first line of protection against despicable hackers and cybercriminals, and a backup tool is the one that restores the data when Antivirus fails to protect and data is compromised, encrypted, or lost.
We can think about layers of security and protection of your infrastructure. Antivirus should be your first line of defense(together with a firewall) and your Backup tool, your second line of defense for your data.
All infrastructures should be planned with these two tools fully implemented and configured to defend and protect against disastrous data losses.
With these two tools combined, organizations have their infrastructure more protected and ready to act if a threat infects the infrastructure.
One is not safer than the other, and they work together to provide organizations complete protection against external attacks. Both solutions are the best way to ensure business continuity and avoid data loss.
As we discussed above, the Backup tool is used not only when there is a threat or data loss from an attack but also in situations where you need to restore your data from any backed-up device.
BDRSuite is an industry-leading comprehensive backup solution designed to protect workloads that span VMware, Hyper-V, Windows, Linux, Mac, AWS EC2 Instances, Microsoft 365, and Google Workspace.
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