In recent years, the battle against malicious actors threatening business cyber security has shifted to a mindset of resiliency instead of solely on prevention and avoidance. Rather than talking about “if” there will be an attack, business owners talk in terms of mitigating risk when attacks occur. Implementing a few ransomware best practices can help restore normalcy quickly after an attack.

When it comes to any cyber security concern, IT managers should think in terms of both prevention and remediation. Training can help employees recognize ransomware attacks and report them, but it is optimal for businesses to work with the assumption that they will need to restore data from an attack at some point. When employees understand the important role they can play in helping the organization avoid the high cost of a ransomware attack, they can be effective at preventing one.

Part of the reason why you need a solid plan in place in case of a ransomware attack is that the recovery of data is often a difficult process. The data may be returned with an encryption, or the attacker may simply take your money and then decline to turn your data over. That’s why you need three ransomware best practices in place:

Creating Your Offline Copy: Your ransomware strategy probably won’t allow you to save every bit of data, so you will need to prioritize which data sets are critical to business operations, such as proprietary or intellectual data.

You may want to explore options for solutions that can inspect data before restoring it to ensure that you are not recovering compromised data. In addition, you should encrypt the data on your offline copy to ensure confidentiality and privacy.

Use the 3-2-1-1 Rule: This guideline helps business continuity by having three copies of data on two different media formats and one copy off-site, plus one step further, which is to have an additional copy in air-gapped offline storage. The copy is air-gapped and stored on tape, completely separate from your network. It helps to improve security and remove risk and is a cost-effective strategy for preserving your data from a ransomware attack.

Restore Your Data Safely: When your ransomware strategy requires you to move to the next phase after an attack, your offline copy of critical business data will be ready. This information is not something that is likely to require daily review, but secure access should require multi-factor authentication. The number of employees with access to the offline company should be kept at a minimum.

Your company’s ransomware best practices can help eliminate the long downtimes and costly restoration that comes with an attack. For more information about implementing a ransomware strategy for your company, contact us at Cloud Source.