Why cybersecurity always requires a layered approach

Ransomware is an increasingly complex challenge for IT departments to solve. With attacks doubling in the last year in the UK alone, there is still clearly a huge amount of work to do until organisations can consider themselves secure – even with the most robust backup strategies in place.

The need for a layered approach

Veeam Software works with partners such as Blocky for Veeam to provide customers with a multi-layered approach to defend customers against ransomware.

During a keynote at the The Channel Company NexGen+ Conference 2021, John Alexander, Veeam Cloud and Service Provider aggregation manager, stressed that Veeam recognises the importance of working with partners in the cybersecurity realm because data recovery and cybersecurity go hand-in-hand.

A last line of defence

In a recent article for CRN, senior editor Gina Narcisi highlights key points from the session where John added that:

“To address ransomware we have to go down through the layers, working with multiple partners to provide a comprehensive solution. With data protection as the last line of defense, it‘s critical that businesses and partners have confidence in that solution.”

A weak point exists because Veeam Software backups stored locally on Microsoft environments lack any native immutability for Veeam Backup and Disaster Recovery volumes.

To close this gap, Blocky for Veeam provides immutable Veeam Backup and Disaster Recovery volumes using application fingerprinting technology. This represents a vital security layer for all Microsoft Windows based Veeam Software installations.

Want to learn more?

As Blocky for Veeam Certified Partners, Complete IT Systems have a team of specialists on hand to demo the solution. We can discuss business benefits and help you understand how the technology works for your organisation. We also offer FREE trials.

To get in touch or request a demo please contact us.

blocky for veeam

Top tips for securing Veeam backups – part 1

Keeping all aspects of your IT secure can seem daunting. Even backups are at risk, despite trying to provide a safe haven for your data. This is where Complete IT Systems and Blocky for Veeam can help. By applying a systematic approach to your security, you can protect data-at-rest and data-in-transit.

In a series of articles over the coming weeks, we will outline how to secure your backed-up data, and how to adopt a pragmatic, practical apprach to doing so.

In this article, part one, we look at how to understand cyber criminals’ motivations, the role of backups in limiting the impact of ransom attacks, and how Veeam backup encryption helps.

Knowing your enemy

The first step to knowing how to protect your backups is to understand your enemy. Cyber attackers target backed-up data for two main reasons. First, preventing an organisation from operating means there is no revenue coming in. Customers are uncertain, and this uncertainty almost guarantees some lost income.

Hackers stop businesses from functioning by locking firms out of their own data. They also extract sensitive personal data (PII) which can be a serious problem in the wrong hands.

The role of backups

Backing up data is a funadmental to good business practice. They also offer a good safeguard against ransom attacks by enabling a restore to the most recent point in time prior to an attack. Applying the 3-2-1 principle to backup means that you avoid placing all your eggs in one basket by storing data on different types of storage.

In the event of a ransom attack that encrypts an organisation’s data against them, with good backups in place IT teams can restore to a known point in time before the attack took place. For these reasons, it is not only essential to take regular backups, but to protect the data as it moves between locations and when it is in its final destination.

Encrypting Veeam backups

Encryption is a vital compont of protecting data. It is also a common trick cyber criminals use to lock organisations out of their own data.

With Veeam, you automatically have inbuilt encryption with the Backup & Replication solution. This enables you to switch on encryption on multiple levels:

  • Backup jobs
  • Backup copy jobs
  • VeeamZIP
  • Tapes

But there are some important considerations to keeping your backups completely secure.

If Veeam’s encryption has not been enabled for an existing backup job, the previous chain is not captured in the backup for that job. In other words, Veeam Backup & Replication’s encryption is not applied retrospectively.

To solve this, it is possible to start a new chain to enable the previously unencrypted chain to be siloed and then secured separately. Enabling encryption for an existing job then allows the in-built Veeam solution to create a full backup file.

What about deduplication?

Using a deduplicating storage appliance as the target for backed-up data means encryption can have a negative impact on deduplication ratios.

Since a separate encryption key is used for every job session, blocks that may be the same can appear to be different despite contaning the same data. By disabling data encryption, higher de-duplication rates can be achieved. The downside of this is that security is reduced.

Risk assessments therefore need to be conducted to balance deduplication with security.

Look out for our next blogs where we will go into more detail on this topic.

Find out more

Read more about Blocky for Veeam and view a short introduction video.

As Blocky for Veeam Certified Partners, Complete IT Systems have a team of specialists on hand to demo the solution. We can discuss business benefits and help you understand how the technology works for your organisation. We also offer exclusive 30-day FREE trials.

To get in touch or request a demo please contact us.

Protect Veeam backups

How to protect Veeam backups

Protect Veeam backups

Backups should be your organisation’s insurance policy against ransomware attacks. They provide the ability to restore your production environment to a stable state at an appropriate point in time. It is vital to protect Veeam backups are also an insurance policy against malware attacks because data can always be recovered.

In theory.

Hackers are now looking for different routes to infiltrate corporate networks.  It comes as no surprise that sophisticated malware attacks are now heading straight for backups. Attacks on backups compromise all the data there before heading for live systems.

It does not help that Veeam V11 running under Microsoft Windows offers no native immutability feature for local backups. Veeam does have the option of a hardened Linux based backup repository with V11, but many organisations lack Linux expertise in-house, or have no desire to add Linux to their Windows-dominated environment.

Cybersecurity provision needs to be strengthened and adapted to keep up to speed. Protecting Veeam backup objects is vital. However, traditional security measures are often not practical for cloud-based online backups in branch or remote offices. This can be because of limited resources or skills onsite, bandwidth restrictions or other practical obstacles.

Blocky for Veeam protects remote office data from malware attacks on backed-up data with 7 simple steps:

  1. Simple installation: Blocky is easy to install with a filter driver tightly coupled to the Windows OS, but only requiring minimal system resources
  2. 85% of Ransomware attacks target Windows systems: Blocky turns the Windows NTFS/ReFS volumes(s) of the Veeam Repository Server into a protected device.
  3. Protect Veeam backups even if compromised: Blocky will continue to protect against Malware even if a virus has entered the program and damaged the Blocky software.
  4. Rapid attack recovery: Unlike solutions based on offsite storage media or cloud-based strategies, Blocky protects your local archives for the fastest possible recovery time.
  5. Cost effective insurance: Blocky for Veeam is priced based on the total backup disk volume capacity and insignificant compared to the costs of a successful Ransomware attack.
  6. Instant alerts: Blocky will send alerts of ANY unauthorised application or processes that try to access a protected backup volume. This can be very useful in the early detection of a malware or ransomware attack. Even the hardened Linux solution under Veeam V11 does not provide this.
  7. Quicker recovery times: Local backups offer the fastest possible recovery time and will typically incur far lower costs than offline backups such as tape or cloud-based object storage.

Find out more

Read more about Blocky for Veeam and view a short introduction video.

As Blocky for Veeam Certified Partners, Complete IT Systems have a team of specialists on hand to demo the solution. We can discuss business benefits and help you understand how the technology works for your organisation. We also offer FREE trials.

To get in touch or request a demo please contact us.

Protect Veeam backups
Protect Veeam backups