It seems like it’s almost every day that the news reports another major company outage and as a result, the massive operational, financial and reputational consequences experienced, both short- and long-term. Widespread systemic outages first come to mind when considering disasters and threats to business and IT service continuity. But oftentimes, it’s the overlooked, “smaller” threats that regularly occur. Human error, equipment failure, power outages, malicious threats and data corruption can too bring an entire organization to a complete standstill.

There’s no end to ransomware in sight. It’s a simple enough attack — install malware, encrypt data/system, and ask for the ransom — so why aren’t we stopping ransomware?  Security vendors are keenly aware of the issue, as well as the attack vectors and methods, but can’t seem to stay a step ahead, causing ransomware to grow from $1 billion in damages in 2016 to an estimated $5 billion in 2017. There are two basic reasons ransomware continues to be a “success” for cyber criminals.

Ransomware attacks are not a fake threat – they are real and increasing day by day. The below insights on ransomware history can help you understand the evolution of its delivery and extortion strategies and be better prepared in case you become the victim of an attack.

Ransomware, locker or crypto-malware, has been around for a long time — decades in fact. Originally, ransomware was an annoyance and a con-trick, but today’s ransomware is considerably different and presents much more of a sophisticated threat to systems and users.

Monitoring data center performance is an essential part of every IT administrator’s job that shouldn’t be overlooked. There are many avenues you can go down when looking at a tool to help monitor performance, but with Veeam, you can do this with Veeam ONE. Veeam ONE has many capabilities, but one of the most important features is the alarm it triggers when part of your virtual environment isn’t working as it should. Pre-built alarms included in Veeam ONE keep IT administrators up-to-date on the operations and issues occurring in their environment in real-time.

The backup infrastructure is a primary target for attack because all relevant environment data is stored in that one single place. Second, if an attacker wants to destroy data, the backup environment is a good starting point because the backup server has access to pretty much every other important system, such as virtualization platform or storage systems.

Today’s highway robber is a lot more sophisticated and savvy. They take far less risk and turn to the latest technology to extort you out of your money by threatening your valuables. In this case your data, your technology and most probably your computing ability.

Of course, I’m talking now about ransomware, the threat that’s been in the news almost every day for the past couple of months. The tool of choice for the modern highway robber has become headline news around the world with variants such as WannaCry and the more recent Popcorn Time. Organizations around the world have been affected by this ransomware, from the UK National Health Service, through to the Russian Postal Service in the last few ... Read more

Complete visibility within the data center is essential to keeping businesses available 24.7.365. Visibility into the data center allows IT administrators to properly utilize resources, be proactive in troubleshooting issues and run reports on their environment. Veeam allows businesses to remain proactive in monitoring and managing their environment through Veeam ONE. If you haven’t heard about it, you are truly missing out, as it works not only for your Veeam-powered data protection operations, but for entire VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V environments as well.

Sometimes, circumstances can vary and you need to adjust your company’s investments based on its resources. Being on a budget and reducing investments can weaken key areas of your organization, but the integrity of your data shouldn’t be affected. At Veeam, we have many FREE solutions ready to sharpen the reliability of your data. Today, I will showcase some of our free tools and explain how you can actually reach a high level of protection at no cost, for both your organization and your personal use.

If one thing has the attention of IT decision makers worldwide, it is the risk of ransomware. We frequently see headlines on outages caused by ransomware and the reality is that this is a big problem for organizations of all shapes and sizes.

Veeam has taken ransomware seriously for a while now . We’ve incorporated features into products, as well as started recommending technical practices and designs to provide resiliency to recover, should there be an incident. We took an additional step and tried to quantify ransomware incidents and some of this information was shocking. One important issue that I’ve raised recently in regard to ransomware is for anyone who thinks it is just a PC problem: It can be a ... Read more

The ransomware threat is real and it’s much more than just a PC problem. Here at Veeam, we see customers and partners encounter ransomware in a number of situations including the data center. One important part of being resilient to ransomware is being able to recover from backups. That’s the Availability you want when things don’t go as planned, should ransomware become an issue in your data center. Here are a number of tips I’ve prepared to incorporate into your designs, both new designs and existing designs using Veeam. Not using Veeam yet? No worries, you can take this advice and implement it accordingly.