- Cyberattacks that want to steal your data
- Immutable storage – data that can’t be changed
- …and what’s immutable backup exactly?
- Benefits of having secure storage of your data
Being hacked and losing your data can be as big a loss for businesses as being robbed of money. This leads to a greater need for secure systems that can withstand cyberattacks. Using backups that cannot be deleted or modified is an effective way to increase security.
*Immutable storage and immutable backups has entered the chat.*
Cyberattacks that want to steal your data
Today, we live in the golden age of data. It’s shaped our modern lives and has turned into one of our most important resources and commodities. But with its elevated status comes an increased number of cyberattacks. Critical customer data and sensitive details risk falling into the wrong hands.
One common form of cyberattack is a malicious computer software called ransomware. As the name suggests, it is an attack where the virus takes your data hostage, demanding a ransom to return it to your control.
Maybe you recognize the term “trojan”? It’s a virus posing as a legitimate program, which when installed encrypts your data and makes it inaccessible. It can be spread via phishing, for example, which is one of the most common types of attack. Fortunately, there are several good ways to actively avoid the phishing scam that drops into your email inbox.
Immutable storage – data that can’t be changed
Immutable storage is a system for the secure storage of data. The technology used is called WORM, Write Once Read Many, and involves storing data in a system where it cannot be rewritten or deleted. Any rewrites of the data, which would normally be classified as a change to the original, are instead treated as new data. This means that if you’re attacked, hackers can’t alter or destroy your latest data update.
– It’s more important than ever to protect our data properly. Immutable storage helps us ensure that our backups remain accessible. It’s one of several measures we’ve taken to ensure continuous access to critical data in our changing cyber landscape, says Martin Stenröse, Chief Operating Officer at Oderland.
So what’s an immutable backup?
An immutable backup is an “unchangeable backup” of your data: just as the data in the system can’t be messed with, neither can the backups. It’s a way of making sure that the backups you have are clean and can be used should the need arise.
To put the terms in context and make it (somewhat) easier to understand the terminology, it’s using immutable storage for your backups.
– One could say that both terms refer to the same thing: That stored and backed up data can’t be tampered with, says Martin.
Imagine you take a photo. The photo you took – the data you saved – is your backup. You print the photo, laminate it and put it in an album. You then put it in a safe. The process can be repeated depending on how many secure copies you want. Immutable storage works in a similar way.
If you have your web hosting account with us, all your backups are immutable without you having to do anything – and we manage them for you.
Benefits of immutable storage
There are several positive aspects worth considering using these systems for your organization, startup or business. Here is a selection of factors that may be particularly important to you:
- Fast recovery: You don’t have to spend time and energy struggling to recover data that has been attacked. You have ready (and clean) backups waiting to go. It’s “just” a matter of restoring it to the version when you last performed a backup.
- Lower risk of downtime: When your systems are attacked, they are likely to be unusable. Downtime for you means customers can’t use your services, which risking both lowered trust in your brand and reduced revenue. Ensure uptime with secure backups.
- Avoid costly mistakes: We all make mistakes. With a backup you can trust, you eliminate the possibility of someone accidentally deleting or making other unwanted changes to important data.
- Less worry about attacks: In some cases, your backups are attacked first, only for you to be unable to restore the data later and have to pay the hackers to get back what’s yours. You don’t have to worry about that with an immutable backup.
If you are a customer of ours and use CloudBackup today, you can add it to activate immutable storage for your backups. We’ll take care of your backups for you, just like we do with all other management of your web hosting.
