Grant DuxburyRecent ransomware attacks exploiting hypervisor vulnerabilities have highlighted the importance of having an end-to-end disaster recovery solution. Over the past few months, attackers have been able to use an exploit to take control of hypervisors and encrypt their virtual disks. Because hypervisors are typically used to pool data from other systems, this can result in large data losses and offline systems for the organizations impacted.
Many businesses have made hypervisors a key part of their disaster recovery (DR) strategy. But because of the hypervisor vulnerabilities, it has become apparent that relying heavily on the hypervisor is a risk.
At Aptum, we believe platform diversity is a key component of an effective DR plan. If you are relying on native replication in your production and DR environments, you risk replicating compromised files, making it more difficult to find a clean backup to use as your recovery point.
An effective DR plan needs to account for failures in any component — whether it be hardware, software, or the hypervisor — and ensure those potential points of weakness are covered. Ideally a DR plan should also have no vendor lock-in. This gives you more flexibility, allowing you to choose from a range of platforms for your DR, such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, VMware, Hyper-V — whatever suits your needs.
Continuous data protection in your DR plan is another important consideration. It allows you to roll back to any point in time if you need to perform a recovery. If you rely on daily backups, you can lose a significant amount of data before you find a clean recovery point. Continuous protection gives you much more granularity.
Managed DR solutions have an inherent advantage because they’re built from the ground-up to have no single point of failure. Service providers, like Aptum, who offer DR as a service, have invested a lot of time and money to build in high-availability and hire expert staff. They also ensure that changes that occur in your production environment won’t impact your recovery data sets, through processes and controls that ensure your backup data remains protected.
Importantly, managed DR solutions are also backed by service level agreements, allowing you to choose the level of protection that meets your business requirements. You can request file-level restore, and full or partial failover of your systems, which includes technical assistance and troubleshooting. You can also minimize your Recovery Point and Recovery Time objectives to minimize your data loss. By replicating your data to the cloud, you can benefit from rapid, efficient failover of your production environment and concentrate on your business objectives without worrying about data loss or downtime.
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