Your Business Cloud Platform, Backup?
Your data is essential for your business’s success. From PII (personally identifiable information) to proprietary intellectual property, every business, yours included, has valuable data and is either motivated to protect it to keep its edge in the market or legally required to preserve it under one of the many compliance frameworks.
Not having a backup for your cloud-based service provider can result in losing this valuable data and risks other levels of exposure from corporate espionage and data exfiltration.
With cloud services, the confusion begins because you must now decide how to back up your data. There are numerous options available, but clearly, you must back up this data somehow, and relying on the provider for such a backup is reckless and often called out as not their responsibility in that extensive service agreement no one reads.
Myths debunked
Let’s dive into some of the most common cloud backup myths …
Doesn’t my cloud platform provide comprehensive backups?
Some backup might be baked into productivity solutions like Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, but it is often not enough to fully protect your organization from a diverse threat landscape. Often these backups lack granularity or exist with the same permission sets as the original data, making them susceptible to the same threats.
The question is, what are we trying to protect against:
- Accidental Deletion
- Purposeful Deletion by Employee
- Third-Party Ransom Based Encryption
- Other Breaches
- Service provider issues (loss of data, government seizure, out of business, long-term outage, hacked, etc.)
So does backup protect me against ransomware?
Cloud backup protects you from needing to pay a ransom if you can recover files and permissions. Other data recovery from a ransom-based attacker can be a reasonably expected outcome. Nothing is 100% effective, so a comprehensive strategy against attack vectors such as ransomware is needed.
Will any backup solution do? Isn’t it all the same?
Functionally, there are many differences between backup products, even in the cloud backup product offerings. The recommendation is to leverage an IT Service Provider (ITSP), Managed Service Provider (MSP) or Managed Security Service Provider (MSSP) that can not only guide you through the choice but monitor the product.
When looking for a cloud backup product, the questions we ask:
- Granular restoration of specific files?
- Granular restoration of whole accounts with permissions?
- Alerting layer for ransom attack vectors
- Transparent reporting on backup success and failures
- Auditable
- Testable
- Secure (isolated from cloud services vendor)
Your success is our success.
Alpha IT is here to be your partner in successful cloud services deployment, security, and ongoing management to ensure you successfully leverage your business cloud services.
Contact us today to schedule a no-obligation consultation.
