Who's Got Your Back - The Dirty Little Secret about Data Stored in the Cloud
My jaw dropped when white-hat hacker (a.k.a. computer security expert) Kevin Mitnick demonstrated an Office 365 ransomware attack live on stage at the IT conference my business partner Erik and I attended. With a bit of crafty social engineering, Mitnick converted the target's email from readable text to gibberish nonsense in about 60 seconds (there is a link to an 8-minute video of the demo at the bottom of this article).
You mean a hacker can encrypt all our online email and files in a few easy steps? I thought to myself.
Yup.
But Microsoft would have taken a backup of my data, right?
Nope.
Let's be honest who among us reads the reams of fine print attached to all the agreements we make for online services? I took a look, and here's the dirty little secret; the Microsoft Services Agreement states, "We recommend that you regularly backup Your Content and Data that you store on the Services or store using Third-Party Apps and Services." That said, Microsoft has some basic protections, but it is not acceptable for a business to rely solely on these measures and, in the event of a data breach or loss, hope for the best.
The landscape is much the same when it comes to Gmail and Workspace (formerly known as G Suite). These accounts sometimes get hacked or users locked out of their Gmail. If there is mission-critical data stored in these cloud services, the responsible business owner needs to plan for getting that data back.
Ok, so who's responsible for what?
Microsoft and Google are responsible for the availability of their services, and that's where their liability ends. At their data centers, they will make sure your data is still available in the event of
A hardware or software failure,
Natural disaster
Power outage
Your business is responsible for your cloud data in the event of:
Human error
Programmatic errors
Malicious insiders
External hackers
Viruses and malware
So you've been warned, but how do you get your cloud data backed up? At Gennix, we have partnered with Datto to offer our clients an economical set-it and forget-it backup for cloud services. Datto SaaS Protection (SaaS stands for Software as a Service) creates an independent second copy of SaaS data to protect it. For additional peace of mind, our technicians review the backup logs daily to ensure that the backups are happening.
The key features of this backup service are:
Automatically takes a snapshot of emails, files, and folders three times daily
Recovers quickly and easily to a point-in-time before the data loss occurred (e.g., ransomware attack, angry employee deleted data)
Maintains de-provisioned user data to save money on licenses
Services backed up (Microsoft: Exchange, Tasks, Calendar, Contacts, OneDrive, and Sharepoint; Google: Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Drive and Team Drives)
If your business uses any of the services listed above, we urge you to implement a SaaS backup service from a reputable third-party company. And if you would like a no-obligation quote from Gennix, we welcome the opportunity to discuss our solutions with you. To reach out, click on "Learn More" below, and let's have a conversation about protecting your cloud data.
As always, we’re here to help.
Ren