Backups are a board room question
Jan 19th, 2020 by Jesper Kråkhede
Just before New Year a large currency exchange company was hit by ransomware and is still struggling to get its services back. When I read about cases like that my first question is always the same: Could they restore?
For management, backup has been an IT topic for decades. Something that costs money and that you never see. Ransomware changed that. Today the backup is what decides if you have a bad week or a crisis that ends up in the newspapers.
So here are a few questions every board should ask. Do we have a copy of our critical data that an attacker cannot delete, even with full admin rights? When did we last test a full restore, not of a file but of the whole business process? How long would it take to get our most important system back, and can the business survive that long? And do we know in which order the systems need to come back?
If the answer to the last one is ‘we´ll figure it out’, you won´t. Not at three in the morning with the phones ringing.
The investment is usually small compared to the ransom. And remember, paying is no guarantee that you get your data back.
A backup you have never restored is just a hope.