You may know backups are critical to recover from a ransomware attack, but did you know that the right way to ensure backups is so that you can have a complete recovery? Hi, I’m Steve Conyers with CMIT solutions and I provide cyber security, IT support and guidance to businesses and nonprofits and today I’d like to discuss four things you need to make sure are happening with your backups to increase the chances of a full recovery from a ransomware attack. Number one is that you should always have a copy of your backup offsite. That’s not in your office. Typically it’s in a cloud environment. Number two, make sure that your backup is not accessible on your network. What that means is that the person who’s hacked into your network to encrypt your data is also looking for backups on the networks that they can encrypt to prevent you from, restoring your data and increasing the likelihood you’ll have to pay the ransom.
So make sure that your backup is not on available on the network. Number three is verify your backup, a product that we use called datto actually sends me a screenshot every night of the computers with their boot up screen because they’ve taken the backup, moved it offsite and actually rebooted the computer into a virtual environment. So I know that the backup has completed successfully, and fourth is you should periodically test your backups. That’s go into a situation where you pretend that you don’t have any data and you restore it from backup and make sure that it is the copy that you’re looking for. You should do that at least twice a year. Again, if you have any other questions you can reach out to me. My contact information is at the end of this video, check around my website and LinkedIn profile. I have other tips and tricks and videos and other things there. Again, it’s Steve Conyers, CMIT solutions, hoping you have a safe and secure day.