Cloud security has been one of the most pressing issues organizations face in today’s cloud era. As a trusted third-party SaaS solutions provider, AvePoint understands that securing your critical workspace platforms means not only having a strong defense against cyberattacks but also planning for an effective recovery plan in case destructive events happen.
Built to protect customers’ data, Cloud Backup is developed with data security top of mind and fashioned with comprehensive backup capabilities for the swift recovery of data from worst-case data loss scenarios, be they user errors, outages, or ransomware attacks.
So, how exactly does Cloud Backup build a defense against ransomware attacks, and what are its disaster recovery plans in the case of catastrophic scenarios?
Read on to find out!
First, Let’s Talk About Disaster Recovery…
Preparing for a disaster recovery plan is different from a backup plan—although both are crucial. While backup recovery is more concerned with recovering accidentally lost data, disaster recovery involves ensuring business continuity when catastrophes happen.
This is why a good disaster recovery plan requires a set of good decisions and processes that would serve as solutions to handle these scenarios. When it happens, will you be able to secure your data center and get it back up and running in no time?
How Secure is AvePoint’s Data Center?
The first thing to remember here is that an Azure Data Center and an Office 365 Data Center are not necessarily in the same location even if the region name is the same. At AvePoint, we elect to use our Azure Data Centers to get as close to Office 365 as possible.
So, in case disaster events happen and we lose a data center, our customers’ data, their settings, and their registrations will still be preserved through SQL backups which are automatically replicated by Microsoft.
Now that we know AvePoint’s data center recovery strategy in the event of a disaster, let’s move on to another pressing issue most organizations are concerned about.
Ransomware
Ransomware is one of the most significant cloud security threats to organizations around the world. The increasingly complex nature of these malware calls for a shift in our mindset: more than planning on how to deal with the aftermath, we are forced to strengthen our defense security to prevent any of it from happening in the first place.
According to Microsoft, these are how most ransomware infections start:
- Email messages and opened attachments
- Websites hosting exploit kits using vulnerabilities in web browsers and other software
In Microsoft 365, that risk comes in the form of losing account information to phishing attacks or losing control of OneDrive or Exchange data. While we cannot prevent those events from happening to your employees, we can help with recovery while ensuring your backup data does not fall prey to the same attacks!
Cloud Backup vs. Ransomware
AvePoint Cloud Backup takes every precaution to make sure that our solutions are secured both for our own business and our clients. Here’s how we ensure that our customers’ data is protected against ransomware:
Hosted in Microsoft Azure AD
The Azure infrastructure comprises various layers of defense and undergoes frequent vulnerability scans and pen tests, therefore, hosting our solutions in Azure AD is a critical step in our data security.
The same defense strategy you employ to protect your users, including single sign-on, conditional access from corporate networks only, multi-factor authentication, and usage pattern alerting all come into play when it comes to how information is protected in our backup service.
This means that because of this, the only people who can access your backup application are protected with the same safeguards as your Microsoft 365 data.
Web-API and Enterprise Monitoring
AvePoint is also integrated with Systems Center (SCOM), which provides independent logs of all administrator activity through audit logs that have web-API. These are then logged through the customer’s Office 365 tenant (piped into their SIEM systems) to ensure all access can be independently verified.
These often have alerts that can identify malicious attacks or compromising activities and can help you be more proactive in detecting attacks.
Secured BLOBs
At AvePoint, once the BLOBs backup data is written, it can’t be modified anymore. Additionally, we give our clients choices for storage locations to keep security in our customers’ hands:
- BYOK: Customer-Owned Encryption Keys: Unique keys are given for each tenant through Azure KeyVault. These are owned and managed by each customer to prevent unauthorized access.
- BYOS: Customer-Owned Data Storage: Customers are given hosted options through Azure or any customer-owned cloud and server storage service to store their data
- BYOA: Customer-Owned Authentication: Customers can retain control of authentication and authorization of AOS through single sign-on with Office 365 credentials and Azure AD applications
AvePoint’s commitment to Cloud Security is one of our top priorities. While you keep you data safe with your own encryption keys, data storage, or authentication, trust that we’ll do our part as well.
Our level of commitment has earned us a SOC 2 Type II attestation and ISO-27001 certification which confirms how serious we are in meeting strict information security and privacy standards for the handling of highly sensitive customer data.
Cloud Backup Recovery
Even with all the strict security measures put in place, the risk of getting hit by ransomware attacks are never zero, and it is always better to be prepared than be compliant. When it comes to data recovery, AvePoint offers powerful data recovery options that are superior to other backup solutions.
Customers can quickly get back to business operations with point-in-time recovery through time-based restores. A comprehensive, granular, and full-fidelity recovery of Microsoft 365 content is available to ensure even your metadata is not lost. It can even perform security rollbacks and has a simple search and object-based restore to let you determine which data you want to recover as a priority.
If you want to learn more about how to protect your data against ransomware and other causes of data loss, check out Cloud Backup’s full capabilities on our webpage.
