US officials tell businesses to watch for potential ransomware attacks

(CNN) article goes on to read - Russia is a "permissive operating environment" for cybercriminals -- one that "is not going to get any smaller" as Russia's confrontation with the West over Ukraine continues and further sanctions are announced, the FBI's David Ring said on a phone briefing with private executives and state and local officials, according to two people who were on the call.

Ring asked state and local officials and business executives to consider how ransomware attacks could disrupt the provision of critical services, the people on the call said."

US officials continue to say there are "no specific, credible" threats to the US homeland tied to tensions with Russia over Ukraine, but they are preaching vigilance.

Read on (CNN) article
The California Homeland Security Strategy and the State Technology Strategic Plan: Vision 2023, make it clear that a collaborative approach is needed to identify, manage, and mitigate cybersecurity risks. It is critical that California prioritize its resources in order to manage the most significant cyber risks and safeguard the services for the residents that depend on them.

To address these challenges, we have developed Cal-Secure, a multi-year cybersecurity roadmap for California. Designed to be flexible and innovative, Cal-Secure enables the state to manage existing and future threats more effectively. Cal-Secure defines a path for state entities to strengthen their cybersecurity measures so that they may continue to provide critical services without interruption.

Learn more read State of California Executive Branch Multi-year Information Security Maturity Roadmap

Commvault Readiness Solution: Assess

By 2021, ransomware attacks are predicted to cost businesses an estimated $6T annually in lost revenue, brand impact, and missed opportunities. In a 2019 Blackhat survey, 65% of respondents believed a security breach would impact them within the year. Minimizing such attacks’ impact requires a comprehensive readiness plan to prepare for and respond to potential outages.

Being Recovery Ready means you have the confidence and ability to quickly recover any data across your environment, across physical servers, virtual machines, and various cloud platforms. You support multiple data-recovery tiers — extending into applications, endpoints, and more — to meet your workload Service Level Agreements (SLAs). From prevention to disaster recovery, you want your data protected and available when needed. And you want the freedom to choose the infrastructure types that best fit your needs and budget.

Business continuity requires a plan. Preparing a readiness plan takes time, something that may be limited. With the increasing likelihood of an attack or disaster, you can’t put it off until tomorrow. With the proper design, implementation, administration, and support of your data protection and management solution, Commvault Readiness Solutions can provide the resources and expertise to prepare you for worst-case scenarios and accelerate your return to normal business operations. Disasters don’t wait, and neither should you.

Key benefits of Commvault Readiness Solutions
Commvault Readiness Solutions provide the resources and expertise to quickly accelerate returning to normal business operations through the proper design, implementation, administration, and support of your data protection and management solution.

Readiness Solutions consist of three key phases:
Ready, Steady, and Respond. Each phase has a distinct focus in the Readiness cycle:

• Ready helps you to align Commvault’s technical capabilities with your recovery objectives.
• Steady assists you in monitoring and maintaining a state of recovery readiness.
• Respond returns you to normal business operations quickly in the event of an outage or disaster.

Within the three phases, Commvault has created six offerings. You have the flexibility to choose the offering that you need, allowing you to customize the support to complement your existing staff and expertise.
Assess solution

Reducing the possibility of data loss with a strategic recovery solution preserves you and your organization’s reputations, provides enhanced customer experiences, and helps to ensure business continuity. Ultimately, it all boils down to can you recover confidently?

By making sure you are more than ready for any eventuality, Commvault empowers you to recover intelligently through holistic risk-mitigation and prevention strategies. The result is you can quickly recover data and applications from data-loss events — like ransomware — or anything else that could threaten your operations, systems, users, or customers.

Commvault’s Readiness Assess offering is designed to help you understand potential threats and risks impacting your ability to “Be Ready”. By understanding the current state of your recovery solution, Commvault’s experts will help identify gaps in your solution and propose a path forward so that you are ready in the event of a ransomware attack or other disaster.

Key activities and benefits
Service deliverables

The Readiness Assess offering examines and reviews the recovery capabilities of your solution relative to your business requirements. This assessment helps align Commvault’s technical capabilities with the recovery objectives.

Commvault Readiness Assess will deliver:

• Readiness Scorecard
• Key Findings and Recommendations
• Prioritized Action Plan
• Readiness Roadmap

Service Duration

While the Commvault expert will be scheduled for five contiguous days for the assessment, the actual duration of pre-engagement and post-documentation activities are expected to span a three week period, depending on your availability and their ability to satisfy the “Customer Responsibilities” specified in this document.
Commvault provides the resources and expertise to accelerate your return to normal business operations.

To learn more, visit commvault.com/services or reach out to your local SLED Rep:

Lawrence Raynes
lraynes@commvault.com