Hybrid Cloud Cyber Resiliency Insights

In this digital age, almost half of all workloads are being run in the cloud. Often, organizations are using both on-premises and cloud workloads: A hybrid cloud environment. As hybrid cloud utilization continues to grow, the risk of cyberthreats is also on the rise. It is absolutely critical to the safety of your data to ensure that your hybrid cloud is protected — this includes your backups.

The Reality of Hybrid Cloud Data Protection

It isn't always ideal, or even possible, for organizations to move all their data to the cloud. While cost concerns and performance issues may be blockers to cloud adoption, organizations like Ciox Health found that the flexibility and resiliency of the hybrid cloud model is the best fit for their business’s needs. However, even though the cloud is highly available, it is not always resilient.
With the continued growth across the digital landscape and rise of new technology, like AI and ML, cybersecurity threats will also evolve and increase. While interconnectivity is a benefit of the hybrid cloud, it also poses a vulnerability that threat actors may try to exploit. For organizations who are operating in hybrid cloud environments, it’s more important than ever to ensure your cloud data is protected in the same way as your on-premises data.

Hackers are Targeting Your Backups

As more organizations continue to shift over to hybrid environments, companies will need adaptable security techniques that can keep up. Otherwise, businesses run the risk of leaving their environment open to malware attacks, like ransomware. And — as more and more threat actors target backups — maintaining the integrity of backup data is of paramount importance to recovery post-attack.
Unfortunately, while cloud-based services are often perceived as more available, outages still occur. The trend is clear, continuing through 2023, cyberattacks increased year-over-year. Because IT is so seamlessly integrated and delivered, once a threat actor exploits a vulnerability, they can easily move laterally across the victim’s environment, gain access to privileged accounts, and even cloud-hosted data. So, to ensure you can recover from any cybersecurity attack, you need organizations to ensure that backups remain unaffected for a smooth and quick recovery process.

Prevention and Protection

At the VeeamON Resiliency Summit, Veeam’s own Samuel Nicholls and Julia F. outlined five steps you can take to ensure your environment is secure, protected, and recoverable in the event of a malware attack or data loss:

1. 3-2-1 rule: Three copies of data, two backup copies on two different types of media, and keep one copy off-site.
2. Utilize logical air gap: Logical separation of backup data from production subscriptions.
3. Implement PoLP: Principle of least privilege to keep your data secure.
4. Immutability and encryption: Data integrity for data resiliency across your infrastructure.
5. Validate recovery: Validate the integrity and reliability of the data on your backups.

You can dive deeper into this topic or check out our keynote featuring cyber security experts by registering for free to view sessions on-demand.

Have you experienced an attack on your hybrid cloud? Share your own hybrid cloud story with #embracethebreach!