EDITOR ’ S QUESTION

NIZAR ELFARRA , REGIONAL SALES ENGINEERING

LEADER , COMMVAULT

This trend is driving the need for the next-generation data protection with active defence . This means that an organisation ’ s data protection solution needs to start assessing its data at a much earlier stage . This is because bad actors often gain access to an environment more than six months in advance .

As data typically resides on premises , in the public and private clouds , in Software-as-a-Service , SaaS applications and on end user devices , the perimeter that organisations must protect is becoming increasingly huge .

On average , it takes 84 minutes to execute the attack , which is a drastic drop in the attack vector in that aspect . The surprising part for many organisations , is that 93 % of attacks target backup repositories , as they contain all their critical data . This is the easiest target to go after and raises the need for organisations to rethink their data protection strategies .

To make things worse , according to the latest cybercrimes trends published by Crowdstrike , malware-free cyberattacks have reached 71 % of the breaches recorded annually . This is not good news , as it means that valid credentials were used to gain access to systems and to have privileges as the legitimate user of a targeted device . This also means that targeted organisations did not even know they were being attacked .

Modern day cyberthreats are essentially moving to in between traditional data protection solutions and organisations ’ last line of defence , backup and recovery . It is at the intersection of these two points where traditional solutions ; perimeter security and the last line of defence are not catching these threats .

As data typically resides on premises , in the public and private clouds , and on end user devices , the perimeter that organisations must protect is becoming huge .

As such , organisations need to be a lot more proactive and thus minimise the use of the last line of defence , backup and recovery by being able to detect bad actors much earlier on . This can be done with early threat detection , checking for suspicious activity , early warning , as well as threat and risk analysis .

Recovery as a last line of defence is necessary but is not enough . With the growing sophistication of cyberthreats , organisations need to understand that there are many measures they can and should put in place to prevent bad actors from reaching their last line of defence .

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