The Ransom Wars

Episode I: A New Challenge

Recovering from corrupted production data following a cyber attack is not an easy task. While we may have discovered that a cyber attack is taking place, we have no immediate way of knowing when the attack began. Our data might have already been subject to corruption for days or even weeks. Responding with the almost automatic “recover from backup” therefore might actually make matters worse rather than remedying the situation. As such, prior to embarking on a recovery process, testing backups from various points-in-time (PIT) is essential and helps us decide which backup version we wish to use to recover from the attack.
We’re not just talking about viruses and malware. With modern attacks, infecting one single network component (e.g., a server) could result in the destroying or encrypting of numerous datasets. Moreover, when it comes to databases, reliable testing processes are more complicated compared to file systems or virtual machines. In fact, recovering from a corrupted database backup image is one of the worst-case scenarios a business could face. Recovering from even just three previous versions of a 1TB database – including testing them and choosing the optimal one – could take hours or even days. So imagine the downtime for a business that runs ten 5TB databases.
That’s why Actifio developed their concurrent recovery capability that enables users to concurrently mount a number of backup PITs for testing within a matter of minutes. Once the user chooses the best image to recover from, it just takes a few more minutes to mount it onto the production server and revive the database.

Epilog: How do we get this done?

Datagon Systems provides end-to-end consultancy, design, and deployment services based on the Actifio platform and combined with the most suitable third-party products. For the resilience of your data.