When thinking about security mechanisms that can be used, most organizations may think about endpoint security, firewalls, SPAM filters, UTM devices, etc.
While all of those mechanisms are certainly important in the multi-layered security approach that is required in securing today’s environments, there is one other important part of security that many may not readily think about – backups.
Are Backups part of an organization’s security posture? Yes, they are.
While most may not readily think about backups as an important part of security, they are and should be an integral part of any organization’s security plan.
Why are backups an important part of security?
How can backups be used to secure IT infrastructure?
Let’s find answers to these important questions.
Why are Backups an Important Part of Security?
Backups are an extremely important part of security as they allow organizations to effectively recover from security events resulting in data loss.
Security events that include data being corrupted, deleted, encrypted, or otherwise lost due to intentional or accidental actions can bring business-critical operations to a standstill. This intentional or accidental deletion can be due to an end user or administrator accidentally deleting critical files. Additionally, it can be due to a ransomware attack that renders files, servers, and other services inoperable. Either way, the net result is the same with business operations being disrupted.
Organizations want to be able to maintain business continuity in any of the aforementioned scenarios. This means organizations must be able to restore or otherwise reconstruct data quickly, effectively, and efficiently. This requires that backups of business-critical servers are in place.
Thinking about data protection in the overall security plan allows businesses to align security planning with business continuity planning.
Security events WILL eventually happen for any organization despite the strength or complexity of the security mechanisms that are in place. No security is perfect security. There are always weaknesses and holes in any security plan, foremost of which are the people that utilize the systems that are being protected.
Organizations must account for data loss happening at some point and having a contingency plan in place to cover those events is essential. Data protection is the core mechanism for any contingency plan accounting for data loss.
The Golden rule for backup
The “golden rule” when it comes to designing a data protection plan includes the “3-2-1” backup rule. Organizations want to follow this best practice when it comes to data protection.
What does the 3-2-1 backup rule entail?
This best practice includes having at least (3) backup copies of your data on at least (2) different kinds of medium, with at least (1) of these stored offsite.
Architecting a data protection solution that includes this methodology helps to ensure resiliency across the data protection plan itself. If we think about it this way – a security event resulting not only in production data loss but also backup data loss would be the “perfect storm” disaster that would likely lead to an organization not being able to recover business-critical data. This could potentially be the “death knell” for a business in today’s technology-driven business world.
A key objective for any security solution would be protecting the business itself. If data protection (backups) are not included in security mechanisms, meeting this objective quite simply is not possible.
Organizations must include backups as a cornerstone component of their security plan. Additionally, choosing a data protection solution that allows organizations to meet the 3-2-1 backup rule is key as well.
Important features to look for in a Backup product?
Now, What key features should businesses today look for in backup products that allow them to meet their security objectives?
Let’s consider the following:
- Image-level backups
- Application-aware backups
- Replication
- Archive to Tape
- Backup Verification
- Offsite copies
Image-level Backups
In today’s modern IT infrastructure, virtual machines reign supreme. Whether they exist in a VMware vSphere environment, Hyper-V, KVM, or other hypervisors, virtual machines are running the majority of today’s production workloads in the enterprise. By having a data protection solution that can take image-level backups, the entire virtual machine is captured with the complete operating system, files, and other software contained therein.
Additionally, an image level backup of a virtual machine allows capturing the configuration of the virtual machine so that when and if an entire virtual machine is restored, the virtual hardware configuration can easily be restored along with the operating system and files that are contained in those backups.
Application-aware Backups
Application-aware backups leverage Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy service to properly backup applications such as Microsoft Exchange or Microsoft SQL Server. A data protection solution that utilizes VSS is able to properly quiesce the application and flush application data from memory and any pending file I/O operations to make sure the application, particularly databases, are backed up in a transactionally consistent state.
It ensures application data contained in backups is not corrupted. Also, it shortcuts the recovery process in that the application once restored is already consistent and there are no additional steps that need to happen such as replaying log files. This can drastically reduce RTO times and ensure business continuity for business-critical applications.
Replication
To ensure that business continuity can be maintained even in the event of an entire site-level failure, replicating production virtual machines to a secondary site such as a DR facility allows failing over those resources in the event an entire site is taken down due to a security event or other disaster.
Replicated virtual machines are an exact copy of the production virtual machine running. Additionally, having a data protection solution that allows automating the process of re-IPing replicated virtual machines is key to ensuring quick failover of those virtual machines in the event of a site failure.
Know More: VMware vSphere Virtual Machine Replication Best Practices
As mentioned in the 3-2-1 backup rule that is considered a best practice with data protection, having backups on at least two different kinds of media is a crucial part. Tape is considered to be an extremely cost-effective and resilient form of backup media that is still in use today especially for archives that are older than 90 days or more. Modern data protection solutions allow organizations to make use of tape in long-term archives. Tape helps to provide resiliency for backup data in the event of a security event where data is lost.
Backup Verification
When thinking about a security event that leads to data loss, having backups that are valid and contain good data is critical. If organizations have backups of business-critical resources, but the backups themselves are corrupt, this again can lead to a nightmare scenario.
Organizations ideally want to have a data protection solution that allows a way to perform automated backup verification. This allows an effective way to ensure the data contained in backups are good and can be confidently used when data needs to be restored.
Offsite Copies
In addition to having offsite copies which can exist on tape, having offsite copies that are copied to additional backup repositories helps to increase the resiliency that allows organizations to be prepared for any event leading to data loss. Backup copies to cloud environments is a great way that organizations today are creating data diversity in backup data. By copying backup data to cloud environments, organizations can ensure backups are easily stored in completely different geographic regions and on separate infrastructure. Effective data protection solutions allow organizations to prepare for a widespread security event affecting data by providing this offsite copy functionality.
Thoughts
Backups are an important part of any organization security. At some point most organizations will experience a security event that will lead to some type of data loss. Utilizing data protection solutions that ensure data is protected in a way that is resilient and is easily restored.
Modern data protection solutions such as Vembu BDR Suite allow organizations to meet security objectives by effectively and efficiently backing up business-critical data. Vembu BDR Suite provides a powerful solution to ensure key data protection objectives are met such as allowing Image-level backups, application-aware backups, replication, archive to tape, backup verification, and offsite copies. By realizing that backups are an important part of security, organizations keep in mind that data is at the heart of what needs to be protected.
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