[This article is sponsored by Synology.]
Malaysians should be familiar by now with downtime issues from various services such as banks, telcos, and more. The reason behind these downtimes is often more sinister than someone forgetting to upgrade a server.
A study in 2019 noted that companies in Malaysia are facing longer downtimes due to cybersecurity breaches, with 27% reporting a downtime of more than 24 hours—which is a huge increase from 2018 when that stat was only 9%.
With the increase of more tech startups and applications, it won’t be too surprising to see this percentage increase in the years to come.
Researchers have identified 5 key challenges that Malaysian businesses have to deal with when it comes to cybersecurity: humans, process, awareness, technology, and budget.
Tackling The 5 Key Challenges On All Fronts
Having a well-equipped or knowledgeable IT team is crucial to cyberattack protection.
IT teams are the first line of defence as they can block, prevent or slow down attacks before the malware can reach the end-users or critical operating systems.
IT teams should also ensure that the servers are equipped with anti-malware solutions, along with updated operating systems which are quite easy to do. Most experienced teams have their own SOP and built-in processes in place to ensure they’re implementing the right technology in the right way.
However, account security is also one of the main points that IT teams need to configure carefully. All users, even employees, should only have access to what they need and nothing more.
This will severely reduce the damage that the attackers can do when credentials are leaked or phished.
There are many modern security practices that a company can utilise such as a well-configured firewall, multi-factor authentication for employee logins or an Intrusion Detection/Protection System (IDS/IPS).
By equipping your business with such practices, you’ll be able to block out most low-level attacks.
Having good security also means that end-users/customers need to be educated on potential threats or breaches.
Users should have a basic level of vigilance on their part to not open random links, attachments or emails from unknown sources. If an employee with an admin account with high privileges does that, hackers can take advantage of this.
Backup Is The Next Step For Clean Data
While you can educate customers and even have top-of-the-line IT talents, systems can’t be 100% secure and protected as cyberattacks will constantly evolve. Having multi-version and off-site backups is one of the ways that you can keep your digital assets and data secure.
This way, if your current database is compromised, you can still fall back on a clean version to restore and recover to.
One of the backup methods known as the 3-2-1 backup strategy has been quite popular for a while now. It basically means that you create 3 copies of your data, on 2 different storage media, with 1 copy of it off-site.
Synology, an established player when it comes to Network-attached storage (NAS) solutions, allows companies to easily utilise the 3-2-1 backup strategy for their business.
Through their Active Backup for Business (ABB) solution, a business can easily backup and recover their data without incurring any additional software licensing costs.
Note: ABB supports Windows-based PCs and servers, virtual machines running on Hyper-V and VMware hypervisors and file servers.
ABB enables a business to quickly bring back their services in a short time while saving on storage costs through data deduplication. It also provides business with an easy deployment tool—all it takes is just an NAS and an installation to automate backup for your business.
Another advantage of using ABB is that it can monitor, manage and customise recovery all based on a single platform. If your company is required to do a recovery, you can also tweak it to either recover specific parts or the whole database.
Adding Onto The 3-2-1 Ecosystem
As part of the 3-2-1 backup ecosystem, Synology also has an additional solution called Snapshot Replication. This allows you to have a ‘point-in-time’ backup which can easily restore files, folders and even important data in just a few minutes.
The Snapshot Replication will automatically back up data to an off-site storage every five minutes and this allows for faster data replication and recovery when it is necessary.
There is also another tool that you can utilise your 3-2-1 backup ecosystem called the Hyper Backup solution.
Hyper Backup provides the data with multiple recovery points, so you won’t be stuck with just a single backup solution.
The benefit to Hyper Backup is that it is quite light on storage space. It utilises advanced data deduplication and compression technology to keep storage as low as possible, even when you have different versions of backup saved.
With ABB, Snapshot Replication and Hyper Backup, you have a complete backup ecosystem for your data and important files. And if you do require a restore, you have plenty of options to choose from.
Backup Services Aren’t Necessarily Expensive
When it comes to cost, a lot of companies would have an issue finding the right solution that fits their business needs. Of course, there are other backup solutions out there but some of them are complex and have expensive licensing fees coupled together.
With Synology’s 3-2-1 backup ecosystem, you will have an all-in-one solution that doesn’t break the bank and is free from licensing fees.
But if you’re unsure on how Synology can assist you in keeping your data safe or if you want to know more about the benefits that you can get having backup to your data, Synology is having a webinar titled: ‘Protect Against and Recover from Ransomware‘ on November 26.
Sign up to register your interest here.
- For more information on the webinar and Synology’s backup solutions, click here.
- Register for the ‘Protect Against and Recover from Ransomware‘ webinar here.
Featured Image Credit: Alex Cheung on Unsplash
