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www.datto.co.uk 12 BUSINESS BRIEFING Datto calls this having ‘an assumed breach mentality’. Justine Harris, Sales Director, UKI at Datto, said: “It is not always the case that businesses that fall victim to ransomware or malware don’t have good security in place. Sometimes a breach is caused by human error or an insider threat that might be harder to guard against. Equally, data might be lost through hardware failure, a fire, flood or deliberately calculated criminal activity. Organisations have to recognise these risks and plan accordingly.” That means implementing a Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) solution as a last line of defence, so that if, or rather when, the worst happens your clients can continue to operate while you restore a safe environment for them. BCDR solutions automate and manage backup and recovery processes for servers, files, PCs, and SaaS applications, using backup, snapshot, virtualisation, and the cloud to protect data and enable fast restores. The process is described in Datto’s BCDR Buyer’s Guide for MSPs : “After an initial full server backup, BCDR software takes incremental snapshots to create ‘recovery points’, or point-in-time server images. Recovery points are used to restore primary server data to a specific point in time (i.e. before it failed). They can also be mounted or ‘virtualised’ to recover server operations on a secondary device or in the cloud. This process is known as failover.” Modern BCDR solutions with cloud DRaaS as standard provide local and cloud backup and local and cloud failover and restore capabilities to meet a variety of recovery scenarios, from restoring a In his opening address at the March MSP Technology Day on Cyber Resilience, Datto CEO Tim Weller warned of the risk posed by ‘cyber attackers at scale’, pointing out that business continuity no longer means protection against server crashes, internet disruptions, accidental data deletions, and occasional natural disasters, but now also includes defence against organised criminal activity and even nation-state attackers. He said: “Defending your own business and your clients’ businesses in this new world means an approach that combines technology, people, processes, and the right partners. We call this new approach cyber resilience. It’s a mindset that extends well beyond buying security point solutions and also acknowledges that cyber attacks will breach the castle walls from time to time.” Clearly, organisations should do all they can to prevent this from happening by investing in appropriate security solutions and staff training. However, they should also work on the basis that a breach will occur at some point. few lost files to a complete server failure. Some also offer additional capabilities like file and folder restore, ransomware detection and rollback, server image export, and bare metal recovery. Backup is not enough It is clear from this description that there is much more to BCDR than just backup. While backup is an important component of BCDR, it is only one element of a complete solution. “It will enable clients to recover their data and applications, but perhaps not that quickly, if it involves the contents of an entire server or if, because of hardware failure, new equipment needs to be ordered,” explained Harris. For small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), the speed of restoration is critical and can have a big bearing on the overall cost of any interruption to normal business operations. Datto’s fifth annual Global State of the Channel Ransomware Report , published in November 2020, showed that between 2018 and 2020, the cost of downtime from a successful ransomware attack sky- rocketed from $46,800 to $274,200 – a rise of almost 600%. Reduced productivity was singled out as the greatest contributory factor to this cost, cited by 62% of MSPs surveyed, followed by business-threatening downtime (39%), lost data or devices (28%), lower profitability (24%) and the ransom demand itself (19%). Harris added: “Significantly, nine out of 10 MSPs said that clients with BCDR solutions in place were less likely to experience significant downtime during a ransomware attack. With SMEs facing Why expecting the worst may be the best way to protect your clients’ digital assets What to look for in a robust BCDR solution Justine Harris, Sales Director, UKI, Datto eBook BCDR Buyer’s Guide For MSPs