AI plays a crucial role in enhancing data backup and recovery processes for businesses. As the technology evolves, automating backup and recovery processes is a prerogative for most organizations today.

In fact, AI is capable of making backups more efficient. For example, newer backup technologies use AI and machine learning to automate the ongoing task of backing up critical data and software components. These intelligent tools can be trained by IT engineers to follow priorities and requirements for data security and recovery plans.

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When it comes to incident response, AI can offer recommendations for actions an incident response team should consider taking. AI also analyzes large amounts of data faster and more objectively than humans, aiding quick decisions during critical minutes after an incident.

More importantly, AI in incident response is capable of automating recovery tasks, such as reinstalling or reconfiguring network servers. For data recovery, machine learning algorithms automate data classification and retrieval, making it easier to prioritize and recover essential business assets. These speed up recovery processes, minimizing downtime and ensuring business continuity. It ensures that data backups, incident response, and asset recovery work together efficiently.

Simply put, AI enhances data backup and recovery by automating tasks, improving incident response, and ensuring efficient recovery of both business and technology assets.

Introducing Cohesity Gaia, the first-ever AI-powered conversational search assistant.

An AI search assistant in backup and recovery

For businesses, having a backup solution that uses AI is essential in ensuring they are capable of ensuring business continuity. Given the rising number of ransomware cases, paying the ransom should not be seen as a solution.

Instead, businesses should invest in backup solutions that can give them instant recovery should they ever face any cybersecurity incidents. The data retrieval process in recovery should be also be seamless.

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Given this need, Cohesity has unveiled the industry’s first AI-powered enterprise search assistant that brings retrieval augmented generation (RAG) AI and large language models (LLMs) to high-quality backup data within Cohesity environments. Cohesity Gaia is a conversational AI assistant that enables users to ask questions and receive answers by accessing and analyzing their vast pools of enterprise data.

The AI assistant relies on RAG. RAG is a natural language processing technique that combines the benefits of retrieval-based and generative-based approaches to improve the quality of text generation tasks, such as question-answering, summarization, and conversational AI. RAG models combine the strengths of LLMs with the ability to retrieve information from multiple sources. RAG enables LLMs to generate more knowledgeable, diverse, and relevant responses and offers a more efficient approach to fine-tuning these models.

AI in incident response is capable of automating recovery tasks, such as reinstalling or reconfiguring network servers. (Image generated by AI).

According to a media release by Cohesity, the AI search assistant is capable of transforming data into knowledge when coupled with the Cohesity Data Cloud. It can help accelerate the goals of an organization while keeping data secure and compliant.  Cohesity has announced plans with the three largest public cloud providers to bring their LLM services to Cohesity Gaia.

The underlying architecture of Cohesity Data Cloud manages and secures data with a unique blend of performance, extensibility, and scale. Cohesity Gaia extends the value proposition of Cohesity Data Cloud even further:

• By building a RAG AI solution on Cohesity’s multi-cloud platform, Cohesity will be able to seamlessly provide RAG AI conversational search experiences across cloud and hybrid environments that will allow enterprises to gain deeper insights into their data and make informed decisions in the future, no matter where their stored data resides.
• Cohesity maintains a fully indexed backup of all files, across all workloads, and at all points in time. This robust capability supports the creation of AI-ready indexes for rapid conversational search and responses, providing enterprises with quick and accurate results. Initially, Cohesity will support Microsoft 365 and OneDrive data and will expand to more workloads over time.
• The unique architecture of Cohesity Gaia ensures that all indexed data is immediately available for reading without the need for backups to be reconstructed. This allows the Cohesity Data Cloud to function like a data lake, providing businesses with real-time access to their data for analysis and decision-making.
• The Cohesity Data Cloud employs granular, role-based access controls and zero-trust security principles, ensuring that only authorized users and models have access to the necessary data. This not only protects sensitive information but also helps enterprises maintain compliance with various regulatory requirements.

Cohesity Gaia offers a comprehensive solution that caters to the unique requirements of enterprises. (Image generated by AI).

Addressing LLM challenges in backup and recovery

“The narrative surrounding the ease of deploying advanced machine learning systems like RAG can be misleading. While it’s true that modern frameworks and pre-built models have simplified the process to an extent, they often gloss over the complexities that arise when scaling to enterprise levels,” explained Gregg Staton, office of the CTO – data & AI, Cohesity in a blog post. 

Enterprises looking to utilize LLMs often face several challenges. Developers must first create more copies of data, thereby increasing the threat footprint for an attack. What’s more, the data may be incomplete or dated. Finally, this approach requires additional time and resources and puts an added burden on the system’s performance. Cohesity Gaia overcomes these challenges by integrating AI capabilities within a customer’s backup environment.

Cohesity Gaia helps organizations make better, faster decisions across a myriad of use cases, such as:

• To assess an organization’s level of cyber-resilience.
• To quickly perform financial and compliance audit checks.
• To answer complex legal questions.
• To serve as a knowledge base to train new employees.

“Enterprises are excited to harness the power of generative AI but have faced several challenges gaining insights into secondary data, including backup, archived and vaulted data – because every approach requires re-hydrating the data, and painfully waiting weeks for the data to be available for analytics and insights. Cohesity Gaia dramatically simplifies this process with our patent-pending approach using Retrieval Augmented Generation,” said Sanjay Poonen, CEO and president of Cohesity.

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“With Cohesity Gaia, for the first time in our industry, companies will be able to leverage generative AI to query their data in a virtually seamless way. Our approach delivers rapid, insightful results without the drawbacks of more manual and risky approaches. In short, it turns data into knowledge within seconds and minutes,” added Poonen.

At the core of Cohesity AI technologies is Cohesity Turing, a patent-pending collection of AI capabilities and technologies integrated into Cohesity’s multi-cloud data management and security platform, that provide operational and data insights. The foundation of these AI innovations is the concept of “responsible AI,” with capabilities and frameworks that enable customers to introduce AI to backup data securely and safely at scale. All

Cohesity Turing solutions adhere to these responsible AI principles:

• Transparency: Protect access to the data with role-based access controls. Promote transparency and accountability around access and policies.
• Governance: Ensure the security and privacy of data used by AI models and the workforce—so the right data is exposed only to the right people (and models) with the right privileges.
• Access: Integrate indexed and searchable data securely and easily while ensuring data is immutable and resilient.

“It is important to understand that Cohesity Gaia does not retrieve data like a search engine; it answers questions,” added Statton.

”For example, if you notice a rise in costs in a region, typically, you would search for dozens of invoices, review and compare them, and see if you can discover the reason for the cost increases. It could take hours, days, or weeks to resolve. With Cohesity Gaia, you simply ask, ‘Why have costs increased in the region?’ and Cohesity Gaia will pull the relevant information from your stored data, analyze it, and return an answer to your question. It’s that simple.”

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The increased usage and dependence on the as-a-service model would also mean that businesses are going to need more protection for these environments. According to Veeam’s Cloud Protection Trends Report 2023, companies are recognizing the increasing need to protect their SaaS environments. Preparing for a rapid recovery from cyber and ransomware attacks was the top cited reason for this backup, with regulatory compliance as the next most popular business driver.

But is backup enough to secure and protect an organization’s data? And can BaaS enhance disaster recovery capabilities for an organization?

The realities of backup and disaster recovery

 Tech Wire Asia caught up with Anthony Spiteri, Senior Global Technologist, Product Strategy at Veeam to get his views on the backup and recovery industry as well as the challenges organizations are facing during Tech Week Singapore.

According to Spiteri, as organizations are moving towards object storage, a lot of companies are now offering object storage as well. The primary source is leveraging objects for a landing zone, but also to run other workloads out as well.

“For us, that means we scale up backup technology, which is effectively the software-defined storage that we have, we can now have enough storage. And then for capacity tier, which is for that medium-term retention to be s3, or whatever it might be. And long-term retention is on Amazon glacier, we almost never touch it. But we want to put you up with the majority of your data, because obviously, with compliance, and regulations, you need to store more and more data. As data grows bigger as well, with object storage, it is now become possible to treat it as a fast recovery landing zone situation,” commented Spiteri.

Spiteri also highlighted that as companies need to store data for several years, it’s not finding its way into insurance plans. For example, businesses would now have to prove their disaster recovery, backup policies, and such to get insured effectively.

“The financial sector led the way early on in terms of compliance around disaster recovery and backup around storage because they had to. But now, everyone is catching up to it. This means there is a need to store more data longer. So when you think about it, there’s a huge immutability coming to storage. That means you can’t actually store data the smarter matter because it is locked in longer. As such, you would have to pay more for this because it is not immutable. And these are the things that are coming into play now with backup and disaster recovery,” said Spiteri.

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Complexities over cost for disaster recovery

Interestingly though, Spiteri believes that most companies are still a long way from taking disaster recovery seriously. Simply because many don’t feel there is a need for it yet. For Spiteri, businesses will only take disaster recovery seriously when they reach a situation that requires them to do so, and this is rather concerning.

“Cost is just one factor in the slow adoption. Disaster recovery is a lot more complicated than backup. You have to think about the application, network, storage, and such. So the orchestration part at the end to end of disaster recovery sits there while we effectively offer replication as a service effectively, people feed other sides of that. Now we have got a product called Disaster Recovery Orchestrator that does a little bit more of the orchestration and reporting. It is a tailored solution and at the moment, it’s getting a bit of traction. But yeah, I think it comes down to that cost is nothing secondary to complexity,” added Spiteri.

Meanwhile, Michael Cade, Senior Global Technologist at Veeam Software pointed out that a key part from a technology point of view is to make sure that Veeam is protecting and offering the ability to protect the workloads their customers are using. While some backup companies protect legacy systems (which Veeam does as well through an agent), there’s not been too much traction in it.

“You need to protect the bulk of your employees and not go outside your area of focus. And that’s what we are meant to be. We’re a backup company and we’re all about recovering. We do integrate into security but we’re not going to pretend that we’re a security company by any stretch,” said Cade.

New trends, same solution

The Cloud Protection Trends Report reinforces the views of both Spiteri and Cade. Highlights of the report showed that while new IT workloads are launching in the cloud at far faster rates than old workloads are being decommissioned in the data center, a surprising 88% brought workloads from the cloud back to their data center for one or more reasons, including development, cost/performance optimization, and disaster recovery.

At the same time, with cybersecurity (including ransomware) continuing to be a critical concern, data protection strategies have evolved, and most organizations are delegating backup responsibilities to specialists, instead of requiring each workload (IaaS, SaaS, PaaS) owner to protect their own data. The majority of backups of cloud workloads are now being done by the backup team and no longer require the specialized expertise or added burden of cloud administrators.

Today, 98% of organizations utilize a cloud-hosted infrastructure as part of their data protection strategy, DRaaS is perceived as surpassing the tactical benefits of BaaS by providing expertise around Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) planning, implementation, and testing. Expertise is recognized as a primary differentiator by subscribers choosing their BaaS/DRaaS provider, based on business acumen, technical IT recovery architects, and operational assistance in planning and documentation of BCDR strategies.

Unfortunately, as is often the case for new cloud-hosted architectures, some PaaS administrators are incorrectly presuming that the native durability of cloud-hosted services relieves the need for backup. 34% of organizations do not yet back up their cloud-hosted file shares, and 15% do not back up their cloud-hosted databases.

The post Complexities hindering backup and disaster recovery capabilities? appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

Over the year, companies that have sufficient backup capabilities have been able to deal with data breaches and avoid serious disruptions to their business. In fact, a new report from Acronis showed that 76% of organizations suffered downtime and data loss in 2021 alone, with system crashes, human error and cyberattacks the main cost of it.

The Cyber Protection Week Global Report 2022, which is released in conjunction with World Backup Day also showed that 80% of organizations ran as many as 10 solutions simultaneously for data protection and cybersecurity. Yet more than half of them suffered downtime because of data loss. Clearly, more solutions do not translate into more protection.

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According to the report, the trend is only getting worse this year. While 78% of organizations globally run as many as ten different solutions, 76% of organizations experienced downtime due to data loss, a 25% increase from 2021. As a result, 61% of global organizations’ IT teams now report a preference for integrated solutions that replace their complicated stacks of cybersecurity and data protection tools with a single, unified console.

In the Asia Pacific, more than half (52%) of local companies in China use between 6-10 different solutions while 19% of local companies use over 11 different ones. In Australia, almost one-fifth (19%) of companies use between 11-15 different solutions.

Meanwhile, local companies in India show some of the worst stats. 28.4% of companies use between 11-15 different solutions, and 9% of companies use over 15 solutions simultaneously.  South Korea ranks the best across APAC with exactly half of the local companies relying only on 1-5 different solutions simultaneously.

“As the entire world is increasingly at risk from different types of attacks, accelerating to universal all-in-one solutions is the only way to achieve truly complete cyber protection. And that’s precisely the problem Acronis has set out to solve. Attackers don’t discriminate when it comes to means or targets, so strong and reliable security is no longer an option, it’s a necessity,” says Candid Wuest, Acronis V.P. of Cyber Protection Research.

(Source – Acronis)

Overconfidence a trend on World Backup Day? 

A worrying trend discovered in the report also showed that despite 70% of organizations’ IT managers claiming to have automated patch management, only a handful of companies follow the 72-hour “golden time” for patch management. 82% also claim to have ransomware protection and remediation. Yet, successful attacks occur weekly and the size of ransom demands grows each year.

At the same time, 20% claimed to be testing backup restoration weekly but this is not consistent with any other industry-issued data. Acronis believes that IT managers are trying to appear better prepared than they are; but that is, in turn, misleading their managers, boards of directors, industry analysts, and customers.

“Our findings prove that organizations are spending more on IT security this year, but when we compare it to their overall IT budget, it becomes clear – organizations are still treating cyber protection as a “nice-to-have”, not as a “must-have”,” the report stated.

Moreover, despite the growing awareness around best backup practices, organizations around the world are still showing reluctance to use modern technologies and best practices, leaving companies more exposed to cyber threats.

Among the key reasons for slow adoption include the technology seems too complex or unnecessary. In South Korea, only 3% of local organizations use the recommended hybrid backup storage approach, while 42% of companies are still only using local storage. China proves to rank best among all APAC countries in terms of hybrid backup storage with 20% of organizations using both local and cloud storage.  India shows positive growth with 54% of local companies migrating to cloud storage, way ahead of the global average of 36%.

The post On World Backup Day, overconfidence a worrying trend among organizations appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

As the world increasingly moves online, the amount of data being produced, collected, and stored digitally has increased tremendously. While offline backup is the ultimate safety net, business requirements today need organizations to be able to have access to their backup data as fast as they can. Hence, many organizations have opted for cloud data backup.

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The reality is though, no matter where data is stored, be it on the cloud or a hard drive, data loss is inevitable. Hence, it is important to back up information on an ongoing basis that includes multiple layers as well.

According to Acronis’s annual Cyber Protection Week Global Report 2022, 80% of organizations ran as many as 10 solutions simultaneously for data protection and cybersecurity. Yet more than half of them suffered downtime because of data loss. More solutions do not translate into more protection.

On this World Backup Day, Tech Wire Asia speaks to several tech vendors on how organizations can not only improve their backup capabilities but also how they can speed up the recovery process. For them, a backup is no longer a simple copy of data but a guarantor for operations for any situation.

When backup data is no longer enough

For Candid Wuest, Acronis V.P. of Cyber Protection Research, as the entire world is increasingly at risk from different types of attacks, accelerating to universal all-in-one solutions is the only way to achieve truly complete cyber protection. And that’s precisely the problem Acronis has set out to solve. Attackers don’t discriminate when it comes to means or targets, so strong and reliable security is no longer an option, it’s a necessity.

Meanwhile, Chua Hock Leng, VP of ASEAN and Greater China, Pure Storage pointed out that with organizations of all sizes storing increasing volumes of sensitive customer data, there is no place for an ‘it won’t happen to me’ mindset. Chua believes leaders need to be thinking of the worst-case scenario and prepare for rapid recovery after an attack.

“Unfortunately, while backup systems have provided an insurance policy against an attack in the past, hackers are now trying to breach these too. Once an attacker is inside an organization’s systems, they will attempt to find credentials to immobilize backups. This will make it more difficult, time-consuming, and potentially expensive to restore.

Organizations need a two-pronged strategy: advanced, immutable ‘snapshots’ of their data and an ability to not just backup fast but to restore fast and at scale. Immutable snapshots are protected because they can’t be eradicated, modified, or encrypted – even if an attacker gains access to sensitive data. They are also relatively easy to restore, but depending upon how much data needs to be restored, snapshots might not be a viable option,” commented Chua.

Moreover, Chua said with a multi-faceted cybersecurity strategy reinforced with snapshots and a rapid restore solution, the restoration phase after a ransomware attack can be reduced from several weeks to just a few hours. This will minimize the impact on users, customers and potential reputational damage suffered from being offline for a prolonged period of time.

Cloud adoption causing backup issues?

With multi-cloud adoption delivering big benefits to enterprises globally, Deepak Mohan, Executive Vice President, Products at Veritas Technologies commented that the shift to multi-cloud environments is also creating new data management challenges, such as unexpected costs, operational complexity, and increased vulnerability to ransomware threats.

“Bad actors are successfully making their ransomware attacks even more impactful by targeting cloud services and data, and as the volume of enterprise cloud data continues to grow exponentially, we expect this trend to continue for the foreseeable future,” he said

For Mohan, World Backup Day 2022 is a powerful reminder that there has never been a more critical time for all organizations to prioritize robust data protection practices.

“Leaders must work with their IT teams to take the necessary steps NOW to implement the right tools and protocols that can autonomously self-provision, self-optimize, and self-heal data management services to keep their critical data safe and available no matter where it is – from edge to core to cloud,” added Mohan.

At the same time, Veeam, which is known globally for its backup and recovery capabilities, highlighted that, ransomware is one of the most pertinent, and when it strikes, it’s more often than people think.

According to Dave Russell, VP for Enterprise Strategy at Veeam, the Veeam Data Protection Report 2022 found that when organizations across APJ have to recover, they only recover 65% of their data on average. For him, losing one-third (35%) of their data is simply not good enough.

Russell explained that backup and recovery solutions are essential foundations of any organization’s Modern Data Protection strategy. Organizations need to ensure their data protection capabilities keep pace with the demands of their business, to close the gap between how much data they can afford to lose after an outage versus how frequently data is backed up.

“The good news is that we’re seeing CXOs acknowledge the urgent need for Modern Data Protection. And investing in such technologies goes beyond providing peace of mind, ensuring business continuity, and maintaining customer confidence,” mentioned Russell.

At the end of the day, backup matters. And as Russell puts it, “on this April Fool’s eve, don’t be foolish and back up your data!”

The post Backup your data or face the consequences appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

If there is one thing organizations should have learned from the last two years, it should be to prioritize data protection and ensure their systems are well prepared to deal with any cyber incidences. Too many ransomware incidents in past have wreaked havoc for organizations, with many facing millions in losses.

And in most cases, it’s because these companies were not prepared to deal with cyberattacks. Many did not have sufficient data protection such as reliable backup and recovery capabilities. Many companies also relied on legacy backup services which took a long time to get systems back up and running again.

Some blamed remote working for causing a lack in prioritizing data protection and cybersecurity. Others felt the costs of data protection were too hard to justify to management, leaving them relying on whichever systems they only had access to.

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According to Veeam’s Data Protection Trends Report 2022, 89% of organizations are not protecting data sufficiently. The report also showed that 88% of IT leaders expect data protection budgets to rise at a higher rate than broader IT spending as data becomes more critical to business success and the challenges of protecting it grow in complexity. More than two-thirds are turning to cloud-based services to protect essential data.

The Veeam Data Protection Trends Report 2022 surveyed more than 3,000 IT decision-makers and global enterprises to understand their data protection strategies for the next 12 months and beyond. The largest of its kind, this study examines how organizations are preparing for the IT challenges they face, including a huge growth in the use of cloud services and cloud-native infrastructure, as well as the expanding cyber-attack landscape and the steps they are taking to implement a modern data protection strategy that ensures business continuity.

For Anand Eswaran, Chief Executive Officer at Veeam, data growth over the past two years, has more than doubled. He said that as data volumes have exploded, so too have the risks associated with data protection; ransomware being a prime example.

“This research shows that organizations recognize these challenges and are investing heavily, often due to having fallen short in delivering the protection users need. Businesses are losing ground as modernization of ‘production’ platforms is outpacing their modernization of ‘protection’ methods and strategies. Data volumes and platform diversity will continue to rise, and the cyber-threat landscape will expand. So, CXOs must invest in a strategy that plugs the gaps they already have and keeps pace with rising data protection demands,” commented Eswaran.

Is backup and recovery really hard to implement? 

It is no surprise that most respondents felt their data protection capabilities cannot keep pace with the demands of the business, with 89% reporting a gap between how much data they can afford to lose after an outage versus how frequently data is backed up. This has risen by 13% in the past 12 months, indicating that while data continues to grow in volume and importance, so do the challenges in protecting it to a satisfactory level. The key driver behind this is that the data protection challenges facing businesses are immense and increasingly diverse.

As mentioned earlier, ransomware continues to be the main culprit. Downtime issues from ransomware are becoming increasingly frequent. With 76% of organizations reporting at least one ransomware event in the past 12 months, organizations were unable to recover 36% of their lost data per attack. This is a stark indicator highlighting legacy data protection strategies that are currently failing to help businesses prevent, remediate and recover from ransomware attacks.

Danny Allan, CTO at Veeam explained that as cyberattacks become increasingly sophisticated and even more difficult to prevent, backup and recovery solutions are essential foundations of any organization’s Modern Data Protection strategy.

“For peace of mind, organizations need 100% certainty that backups are being completed within the allocated window and restorations deliver within required SLAs. The best way to ensure data is protected and recoverable in the event of a ransomware attack is to partner with a third-party specialist and invest in an automated and orchestrated solution that protects the myriad data center and cloud-based production platforms that organizations of all sizes rely on today,” said Allan.

Modern data protection on the cloud

Veeam’s report also showed that to close the gap between data protection capabilities and this growing threat landscape, organizations will spend around 6% more annually on data protection than broader IT investments. While this will only go some way to reversing the trend of data protection needs outpacing the ability to execute, it is positive to see CXOs acknowledge the urgent need for Modern Data Protection.

Legacy data protection has had its glory days. While the technology may be useful for some legacy infrastructure, the reality is, the cloud is becoming the dominant data platform. 67% of organizations already use cloud services as part of their data protection strategy, while 56% now run containers in production or plan to in the next 12 months.

Platform diversity will expand during 2022, with the balance between data center (52%) and cloud servers (48%) continuing to close. This is one reason 21% of organizations rated the ability to protect cloud-hosted workloads as the most important buying factor for enterprise data protection in 2022 and 39% believe IaaS/SaaS capabilities to be the definitive attribute of Modern Data Protection.

Allan added that the power of hybrid IT architectures is driving both production and protection strategies through cloud storage and Disaster Recovery utilizing cloud-hosted infrastructure.

“The benefits of investing in Modern Data Protection go beyond providing peace of mind, ensuring business continuity, and maintaining customer confidence. To balance expenditure against strategic digital initiatives, IT leaders must implement robust solutions at the lowest possible cost,” Allan said.

Other key findings from the Veeam Data Protection Trends Report 2022 include:

• Businesses have an availability gap: 90% of respondents confirmed they have an availability gap between their expected SLAs and how quickly they can return to productivity. This has risen by 10% since 2021.
• Data remains unprotected: Despite backup being a fundamental part of any data protection strategy, 18% of global organizations’ data is not backed up — therefore, completely unprotected.
• Human error is far too common: Technical failures are the most frequent cause of downtime with an average of 53% of respondents experiencing outages across infrastructure/networking, server hardware, and software. 46% of respondents experienced cases of an administrator configuration error, while 49% were hindered by accidental deletion, overwriting of data, or corruption caused by users.
• Protecting remote workers: Only 25% of organizations utilize orchestrated workflows to reconnect resources during a disaster, while 45% run predefined scripts to reconnect resources running remotely in the event of downtime and 29% manually reconfigure user connectivity.
• Economic drivers remain critical: When asked about the most important factors when purchasing an enterprise data solution, 25% of IT leaders are motivated by improving the economics of their solution.

With that said, the only comforting news for organizations is that these issues can be addressed and improved. Having modern data protection may sound like a big investment for most enterprises. However, business leaders need to understand that the costs of downtime and loss of data to cybercriminals can end up costing way much more.

The post Veeam: Modern data protection key to business continuity appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

This was the key highlight from Craig Jones, Interpol Cybercrime Director for APAC during his presentation at the Acronis CyberFit Summit in Singapore. As much as Interpol wants to help organizations deal with cybercrime, they are not the first responders to any cyberattack. The first responders are the cybersecurity systems that organizations have in place to deal with cyberattacks.

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What’s more concerning is that a lot of cybercrime cases are not reported. Simply because organizations fear the impacts of such incidences. Statistics have shown companies’ reputations being impacted by cybercrime. For those that have paid the ransom, there is no guarantee they get all their data back or won’t be targeted again.

In his opening address, Patrick Pulvermueller, CEO at Acronis, said “The threats are continuously increasing because it is an easy way to reap a lot of benefit without being found.”

For Jones, cybercrime is no longer just about cybercriminals in hoodies. It’s a business model as they have evolved and have their own criminal business supply chain. The rise of ransomware-as-a-service is proof of how the cybercrime supply chain continues to be motivated by cybercriminals who are only after financial gains.

Jones’s presentation pretty much sums up cybercrime in the region. Indeed, it’s a big and growing problem for all organizations, especially with remote working and more technologies being adopted by them.

Sheena Wee, an analyst at Canalys echoed Jones’s sentiments. According to Wee, as the entire world is increasingly at risk from different breeds of attacks, accelerating to universal all-in-one solutions is the only way to achieve truly complete protection.

“Attackers don’t discriminate when it comes to means or targets, so implementing strong and reliable security is no longer a ‘nice-to-have’, it’s a necessity and one of the most important steps businesses and consumers should employ to protect themselves,” explained Wee.

(source – Acronis)

Mitigating cybercrime

Speaking at a forum during the summit, Bryce Boland, Head of Security for ASEAN at AWS said that most organizations only take cybersecurity as a wake-up call once they have been targeted. He pointed out that it all goes down to how prepared the organization is in dealing with a cyberattack. This includes ensuring they have sufficient backup and recovery options and have also tested them to ensure they are able to ensure business continuity.

Unfortunately, he said that a lot of organizations only find out to do these things when the attack happens. And it is going to be a difficult path to recovery for them.

“Whenever an organization is breached, companies need to understand how they got in and what they do. It may only be the tip of the icebergs. They may have left back doors. This is where an incident response team comes in. If you don’t have one, you should look to your tech partner to help you to get an incident response capability to understand what happened and be able to take steps to mitigate the damage and avoid the same issues in the future,” commented Boland.

As such, Kevin Reed, CISO at Acronis highlighted that Acronis blocked 5.8 million URLs on workloads in January 2022, after email filtering. They have seen that 37% of workloads have at least one malware attack blocked in 2021.

“Backup is king when it comes to ransomware protection. And in December, our customer made more than 91 million backups,” said Reed.

For the last three years, Acronis pioneered the field of cyber protection as the first company to combine cybersecurity, data protection, and management into one solution. Over 20,000 service providers are using Acronis Cyber Protect to protect more than 750,000 businesses.

Acronis cloud business in Asia grew by 72% in the number of workloads protected, and by 49% in the number of businesses protected, the most impressive growth year over year.

In addition to its business expansion, the company has been aggressively growing its workforce. Apart from its Synapsys acquisition in 2021,  Acronis now has 44 data centers across the globe, with plans to expand to over 100 locations worldwide within the next two years. Acronis has also released plans to open five data centers in APAC in 2022.

The post Is backup and recovery enough for organizations to mitigate cybercrime? appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

Cyber risks for organizations are expected to continue to be a major concern for organizations in 2022. While 2021 saw increasing cyber attacks as well, what disrupted most businesses were sophisticated ransomware attacks. Not only were these attacks harder to detect, but they also had a bigger impact on their victims.

Studies show that ransomware attacks soared 93% in the first half of 2021. With the increased incidence of cyberattacks, the threat of ransomware, and the potential for human error in administering cluster security, organizations need a fast, simple, and comprehensive way to assess their security posture and address any concerns quickly.

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Some of the biggest ransomware attacks in 2021 included the attacks on the supply chain network as experienced by Colonial Pipeline and JBS. Other major cyberattacks in 2021 saw tech companies like ACER and managed services provider Kaseya also targeted.

As cyberattacks target more industries, the cyber risks for them increase as well. According to statistics from CyberSecurity Venture and Gartner, the predicted total ransomware cost in 2021 is US$ 20 billion. A typical ransomware attack costs 10 to 15 times more damage to organizations than the ransom demand.

Cyber risks are more concerning in the future also because a ransomware attack is expected to occur every two seconds by 2031 compared to every 11 seconds today. The biggest effect of this is that only 2% of an organization’s disaster recovery efforts are aligned with business-defined recovery requirements.

“It is only going to get worse. Research shows that cybercrime damage is predicted to be worth US$ 10.5 trillion by 2025. And only 11% of organizations can recover data within 72 hours of a cyberattack. I think organizations must be prepared to recover. A lot of businesses cannot last a 72-hour downtime,” said Ravi Rajendran, Vice President for Cohesity Asia Pacific and Japan.

As such, sufficient backup and data management are now a prerogative that companies can’t afford to not take seriously in dealing with cyber risks. Organizations need to be able to recover from any ransomware attack as quickly as possible. Any prolonged downtime could lead to severe repercussions.

Cohesity recently introduced Security Advisor, an addition to the company’s Threat Defense architecture that gives customers an easy way to improve their security posture in an era of rapidly sophisticated and damaging cyberattacks. The new feature helps reduce human errors and achieve a higher level of cyber resilience in customer environments that are managed through the Cohesity Helios data platform.

Security Advisor scans the customer’s Cohesity environment, including an array of security configurations, and considers a host of factors such as access control, audit logs, and encryption framework that are critical to protecting the security posture of the data cluster. Organizations then receive a score that tells them how they are performing against Cohesity’s best practice recommendations.

Additionally, the companies are provided with recommendations on how to address potential risks and help keep their platform and the data secure from bad actors — both internal and external — which can limit their exposure to cyber extortion.

Security Advisor complements Cohesity’s CyberScan application on the Cohesity Marketplace. CyberScan enables organizations to uncover cyber exposures and blind spots within their production environment by running on-demand and automated scans on backup snapshots against known vulnerabilities.

“Enterprises use an array of tools to generate and manage data, and each tool has its own security settings – making it difficult to review every setting and control access across all their disparate technology. This lack of visibility and control leaves IT environments vulnerable to cyberattacks,” said Brian Spanswick, chief information security officer, Cohesity.

Cyber risks in 2022 and beyond will only get more complicated and sophisticated. For Christophe Bertrand, practice director, Data Protection for Enterprise Strategy Group, their recent research shows that ransomware is the top IT spending priority for 2022, and that ransomware preparedness is now a core business conversation at the executive level and in the boardroom.

“As cybercriminals become more aggressive and creative, against a backdrop of the cybersecurity skills shortage, organizations are struggling to maintain an optimal security posture,” he added.

The post 2022: Can companies mitigate increasing cyber risks? appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

In fact, ransomware attacks are becoming more sophisticated, and companies that do not have adequate data protection services could find themselves losing more than anticipated.

2021 saw record-breaking cyberattacks globally and has affected businesses in almost every industry. Cybercriminals are no longer just looking at launching ransomware attacks, however.

Many are locking data — and even deleting it, for the sheer kick they get out of messing around with organizations.

CLOUD BACKUP ENSURES BETTER CYBERATTACK RECOVERY

Aaron Raj | 22 October, 2021

At the same time, there has been a clear shift in focus to improving remote working capabilities, access to cloud infrastructure, and securing data.

While hybrid and multi-cloud models aren’t new, the freedom they provide will make it even more of a reality moving forward.

Veeam’s Data Protection Report 2021 showed that 96% of organizations are accelerating cloud usage. 23% had a server outage in the past 12 months, while another 28% increased their DRaaS usage within 2 years.

With 2022 just around the corner, here’s how organizations can make the most of data protection services, on top of key trends to look out for, as shared by Danny Allan, Chief Technology Officer at Veeam.

A monumental shift in M&As

While 2021 saw global mergers and acquisitions (M&A) reach new highs aided by low-interest rates and high stock prices, larger acquisitions will be few and far between as company valuations continue to rise.

He believes that only well-established, cash-rich companies will have the money required to make new purchases.

The higher purchase threshold will make it harder for SMEs to grow and evolve, which will substantially give larger, established firms an edge up.

AI and automation will replace (some) jobs

There is no denying that a talent shortage amid a global pandemic has left many jobs unfilled. This then has made way for the advancement of AI and automation to fill new roles.

“We have seen technology begin its takeover in the service industry with the introduction of robotic waiters during the pandemic.”, illustrated Allan.

He also added that job replacement will largely affect entry-level jobs in finance, healthcare, legal, and software sectors.

This will, however, make it more difficult for fresh graduates entering the workforce to gain job experience in the future.

The CI/CD push

Thirdly, Allan pointed out that continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) will stabilize and standardize to become an IT team requirement.

The Bill Gates memo in 2001 became the industry standard in how to design, develop and deliver complex software systems – and today it feels like there has been no standard since then.

And it’s not surprising that in 2022, there will be a shift towards more stability and standardization for CI/CD. IT leaders have an opportunity to capitalize on this high-growth and high-valuation market to increase deployment activity and solve the “day two operations problem.”

The talent conundrum

“2022 will also see the tech labor market meet with big money and big challenges. The COVID-19 economy, and the subsequent Great Resignation, throughout the last two years, certainly made their mark in the tech industry.”, he mused.

“As we continue to see turnover and lower employee retention, tech salaries will begin to grow in 2022 to incentivize talents to stay.

“I see this causing an interesting dynamic, presenting bigger challenges, especially to the folks in the startup and VC world. The bigger tech giants are the ones who can meet the high dollar demand and deliver benefits for a competitive workforce.

“It will be interesting to see in the years ahead what this does for innovation, which tends to come from the hungry startups where people work for very little for a long time,” he added.

He also shared that there could so be a resurgence of tech talent returning to “old guard” companies to meet their needs for stable (and large) salaries, forgoing the competitive, hard-knocks of startups that could cause a skill and talent gap that lasts for years to come.

Shift to privacy-first

Apart from that, new privacy-focused legislation will shift attention to data sovereignty clouds.

Data regulations and privacy requirements from the GDPR and other agencies in the region will become stricter, especially in requiring data sovereignty clouds to keep data within nations or within a certain physical location.

Some will see this as an obstacle, but once implemented, Allan believes this will be a good thing as it puts consumer privacy at the core of the business strategy.

They were wrong about remote working

Lastly, containers will become mainstream to support the cloud explosion of 2021.

Allan highlighted businesses wrongly predicted that employees would return to the office, as normal, in 2021.

Instead, remote working continued, and companies were forced to develop long-term remote working strategies to ensure efficiency, sustainability and to retain employees seeking flexibility.

“This remote work strategy demanded cloud-based solutions, resulting in an explosion of cloud service adoption. To meet this moment, containers will become mainstream in 2022, making the generational shift to cloud much easier and more streamlined for organizations,” said Allan.

With that said, the data protection industry will be determined by these changes organizations face in 2022.

But whatever it may be, the reality is, everyone is taking data protection and privacy seriously.

The cyberattacks of 2021, increased tech adoption, formation of new companies and regulatory requirements clearly indicate the importance of data protection services for organizations.

The post 2022: The year to prioritize data protection services appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

Healthcare data continues to be one of the most highly desirable information by cybercriminals around the world today. Not only do healthcare data have a high value on the dark web, but it can also lead to serious implications if the information is exposed or made public.

What makes more worrying about healthcare data is the amount of information that it carries. From medical history records to personal information to even banking details, failure to secure this data properly can lead to organizations facing huge fines and losses should they be breached.

WHY IS IT GETTING HARDER TO SECURE HEALTHCARE DATA?

Aaron Raj | 22 September, 2021

In fact, since the Covid-19 pandemic started, healthcare institutions are now becoming increasingly targeted by cybercriminals. And now with a new variant making data even more important for contact tracing purposes, keeping it secure is a prerogative healthcare companies can’t afford to miss. Part of the reason for this is that healthcare companies simply do not have sufficient skills or experience in dealing with healthcare data. In the US, more than 40 million patient records have been compromised this past year by incidents reported to the federal government in 2021.

At the same time, the use of more IoT devices in healthcare, telemedicine services, and other modern technologies have also led to growth in data which can be hard to be managed by current systems in most healthcare devices. Most medical professionals, aim to only treat patients and often do not understand the importance of keeping data safe and secured.

As such, there have been increasing data breaches in medical facilities with cybercriminals targeting healthcare data to not only steal it but also lock systems that can cripple hospital operations. Some recent examples of a healthcare data breach include the data breach at Fullerton Health, a leading integrated healthcare platform.

The hackers claimed they managed to steal the data of 400,000 people, including the insurance policy details of Singaporeans. A sample of the data uploaded by the unidentified hackers included customer names and identity card numbers, as well as information about bank accounts, employers, and medical history. It also had the personal details of the customers’ children.

Improve healthcare systems or protect healthcare data?

Kamal Brar, Vice President and General Manager, Asia Pacific and Japan at Rubrik

According to Kamal Brar, Vice President and General Manager, Asia Pacific and Japan at Rubrik, no one expected healthcare to see a massive spike in cyberattacks. Kamal feels there are two reasons for this.

Firstly, the sensitivity of patient data and the critical stress on medical facilities and the service providers massive increased. So with that, the focus came onto patient care instead of security systems and data. And with a new variant, which becomes difficult to manage, from a patient care perspective, data becomes crucial because it’s how the data can be used to understand the new variant and patients.

“There is so much data fragmented across different systems. The trend in healthcare is an area of weakness and no one was thinking of it as a new requirement. And when you have such a scenario, bad actors will look for the most sensitive form of data and that’s patient care data. The lucrative nature of getting access to this data is one part while the speed at which the stress on systems goes through led to exploits. Each country had their own challenge in managing data, especially in securing it, which led to ransomware going up three to five folds more,” said Kamal.

The value of the data is now at its highest. As new variants come in, there are processes already in play for countries to follow to manage the situation. Contact tracing, safety protocols have been around for some time. But some of this data needs to be shared. And this data needs to be shared digitally, like for travel and such. Sharing data efficiently continues to be a huge challenge.

“Fundamentally, it is not just patient data. Airlines, insurance companies need data. There is so much information going around multiple ecosystems. And securing them is a big challenge. There have been breaches in the past. Across the board, we are living in a data-driven world and we need to make sure the data in all circumstances,” added Kamal.

Unfortunately, healthcare also has many legacy devices and systems. And there are also IoT devices that are connected to the WiFi or Internet. Telemedicine is also becoming increasingly demanding in some countries. All these components can have vulnerabilities. Legacy systems like patient care systems may not be updated and are heavily exposed to any type of threats.

“There are modernized healthcare devices that are built on a zero-trust architecture. For some of the patient care devices, no one thought that these could be hacked. And when hospitals suffer a ransomware attack, it’s not just financial systems impacted but patient care as well,” explained Kamal.

Visibility and recovery is key 

(Photo by MARIO TAMA / GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA / Getty Images via AFP)

Healthcare needs to look towards a zero-trust policy. Kamal highlighted three guiding principles of the zero-trust policy. First, trust no one, always validate all connections. It was the other way round in the past, but this mindset needs to change. The other part is understanding the impact of a data breach. Healthcare facilities need to understand a data breach or ransomware attack to build their security. Finally, it is about automating the context and response. They need to understand how to trace the impact and what it means. This is where visibility is key and having appropriate recovery and backup systems.

“A lot of companies forget data protection. They need to think of the problem inside out. The most important thing is how quickly can they recover from an attack. If you look at healthcare incidents in the past, it is all about locking the systems. What’s key is how quickly can they recover those systems and get them back up and running,” said Kamal.

At the end of the day, the reality is healthcare data is becoming highly sought after by cybercriminals, and the only way healthcare facilities and service providers can protect their data and systems is to ensure they have full visibility on it. They also need to ensure that employees are fully aware of the importance of keeping data safe and secure.

For healthcare industries and service providers, new variants will only mean higher demand for data. Legacy infrastructures and IoT devices need to be protected. Backup and recovery systems should also be a key feature they look into. Ransomware recovery could not just save the organization but lives as well.

The post Omicron variant may require more stringent healthcare data protection appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

As remote and hybrid working appears to continue through 2022, one of the biggest problems workers face is how to go about with the recovery of deleted data — especially when it’s accidental.

Indeed, accidental deletion of data can and will happen when working on various devices.

And thus, a key question on the minds of a lot of people is — how can you recover accidentally deleted data?

In fact, the need for recovery of accidental data deletion is so great that a global study from Veritas Technologies showed that 57% of office workers have accidentally deleted vital data from cloud apps such as Office 365, with 14% doing so multiple times per week.

What’s more concerning is that almost all respondents (92%) incorrectly assume that their cloud provider would be able to restore deleted files for them. Also, 44% incorrectly think data in the cloud is safe from ransomware.

Accidental data deletion has also caused strong emotional distress among employees, especially when they realize their lost data is gone forever. The stress is made worse by a culture of punishment incorporating shame and fear.

As such, almost one-third of employees lied to cover up the fact they had accidentally deleted office data and 26% said they kept quiet because they were ashamed. Another 25% said they would either do nothing or pretend nothing had happened in a ransomware incident—making it difficult for businesses to limit the impact of the breach.

In today’s fast-paced environment, speed is essential, especially when it comes to data. Any delays to data access or recovery, be it by accidental deletion, or being locked out by ransomware, can lead to huge problems for an organization. Backup service providers continue to advocate the importance of having sufficient backup and recovery tools for such incidences.

To understand better about deleted data recovery, Tech Wire Asia spoke to Andy Ng, Vice President and Managing Director for Asia South and Pacific Region at Veritas Technologies. Andy explains how accidentally deleting data may not be the end of the world for employees, provided they have the right data recovery programs in place.

(source – Shutterstock)

Is it possible to recover deleted work data?

Most cloud storage services will allow users to recover deleted files within a certain time window, for example, 30 days. However, recovery is not guaranteed and varies across different cloud service providers. In general, cloud storage services will automatically clear your trash after a stipulated period to free up space. Depending on how much storage has been used up, some files might be deleted sooner than expected. Additionally, the deleted files will also be erased from the cloud the next time your system syncs.

Not all backup and recovery solutions are created equal, so organizations need to identify what they actually need. For organizations that are looking at enterprise-grade backup and recovery capabilities beyond the built-in cloud protection, they would require a comprehensive toolset that provides full-coverage backup with flexible recovery options, plus a high level of performance and scalability.

This would enable organizations to protect, recover and archive their data, including deleted work data. For example, a backup and archive solution that uses immutable storage would help to protect data against unwanted deletion and modification.

What are the biggest concerns around the recovery of deleted data?

It is disturbing that nearly all the Singapore employees (92%) polled in the Veritas study thought their cloud provider would be able to restore their files for them. This false confidence in cloud data protection is causing businesses to lose critical data.

Unknown to some, a bad deletion – either accidental or malicious – could go unnoticed past the prescribed expiry date. There is no backup copy available for these expired items. Similarly, there is no option for recovery for items that have been deleted permanently.

The challenge is further compounded by the accelerated adoption of the cloud, which leaves organizations exposed to ransomware vulnerabilities as more cybercriminals are looking to exploit proprietary data stored in cloud services due to the integral role they play in today’s business environment.

According to the latest Veritas research, many employees are not forthcoming with ransomware incidents, with just 31% in Singapore saying they would immediately admit introducing ransomware into their organizations, and another 25% saying they would either do nothing or pretend nothing had happened.

As such, without knowing the full details of a ransomware attack, it is harder for businesses to take swift remedial action to limit its impact. With the surge in ransomware attacks, this is a security gap that companies must quickly address or risk disruption and downtime for their businesses.

How can businesses ensure employees take responsibility?

Businesses should set clear retention policies to determine how long data should be retained for operational and compliance needs, who has access to the data, and classify data storage according to tiers.

Employees should be fully trained on the policies and tools that are being deployed – this will help to reduce accidental policy breaches including data deletion, and ensure employees know how to access and retrieve data that is lost or corrupted promptly.

Companies should also eliminate the culture of shame and punishment, and instead foster one where employees are encouraged, rather than blamed, for coming forward when they report data loss incidents.

Changing the dynamics of incident reporting would also help to empower businesses to take prompt remedial action in the event of data loss or ransomware incidents.

Some programs can autosave files or warn users before a file or data is deleted. Should this process be enhanced so employees understand it better?

Such features can be beneficial, but human error or malicious deletion and system downtime would still lead to data loss. Employees could potentially be the weakest link and it pays for organizations to educate employees on the importance of adopting sound data hygiene habits.

It is also important to realize that cloud service providers operate on a shared responsibility model – they provide the applications, but it is up to businesses to protect their application data. It is every business’s responsibility to protect their own data, whether in the cloud or stored on their own devices. If businesses can get that right and make it easy for workers to restore lost files, then they can take the pressure off their employees.

What does help, therefore, is deploying comprehensive SaaS data protection tools to back up data across all cloud applications. This allows businesses to recover from all data loss scenarios while also eliminating threats such as ransomware and accidental or malicious data deletion.

The post Singaporean workers distressed by accidentally deleted cloud data appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.