Features

Mandi Pietersen, Dariel

Backups are, theoretically, designed to be the one clean thing left standing in a compromised estate. Experts no longer describe them as simple storage tasks but, rather, as a critical part of an organisation’s resilience strategy, determining how quickly, and safely, it can return to business after a cyber incident. But according to Kaspersky’s Compromise Assessment, as many as 40% of the web shells its analysts found were sitting in backups, undetected, ready to be reinstated the moment systems came back online. 

“A backup strategy is only useful if it protects the right systems, can survive the same incident that affects production and can be restored within a timeframe the business can tolerate,” says Mandi Pietersen, senior cloud and systems administrator at Dariel, a software engineering and IT services firm. “The important lesson is that backup success is not measured by whether a job completed successfully, but by whether the business can recover the systems it needs.”