The importance of regularly scheduled backups amidst the current climate of cyber attacks is an absolute must, especially when you consider the time it takes to recover from a cyber attack if you don't have a backup.

Rinat Dequcinis, sales and marketing manager, Pedion Technologies, says, "If you're subjected to a ransomware or similar cyber attack, and you have a recent backup, you'll need to do a complete wipe of the affected drives, restore the operating system and then restore the backup data. You might have lost 24 hours' worth of information, but that's better than losing all of your company's information. These kind of restores do not take long and the users are back online in no time."

Dequcinis cites the recent WannaCry ransomware attack to illustrate the impact that such an attack can have: "Just one example is when you consider that in the UK, patients scheduled for surgery under the NHS had to be either rescheduled or diverted to other hospitals, you realise the full extent of the chaos. Test results, prescriptions and patient records were lost, and had to be recaptured manually. The time, cost and manpower required to do all of this could have been minimised, as well as the downtime, had the correct backup solution been implemented."

She explains that by using the correct tools, businesses are able to monitor and manage cyber attacks with proactive remediation capabilities. "So for example, businesses could consider implementing a toolset that allows companies and their administrators to manage the endpoint and security from a single dashboard. Doing so means that, should there be an attack on any machine or portion of the business through malware or cyber attacks, the business will be able to take the necessary corrective procedures and isolate the environment that has been attacked. Such a toolset should have the ability to scan the relevant systems for common indicators of attack and continuously monitor the environment and pull information from external databases to ensure all rules are constantly up to date."

"The benefit that we've seen when businesses adopt this type of toolset is that they get warned before incidents occur," continues Dequcinis, "they're better equipped to deal with the attacks and can be proactive in ensuring the attacks are contained. They have predefined security protocols that are best practice based on industry standards, as well as being constantly updated."

When choosing a solution to defend your business against cyber attacks, bear the following in mind:

* Look for tools that assist in notifying you of an attack and isolating the affected machines from the network and other machines.* The capability to remotely shut down machines to prevent further damage on the hard drives.* Once your environment has been affected, you must be able to scan to ensure no-one on the network has been affected.* Ensure your backup solution has the intelligence to ensure any corrupt data will not contaminate the clean backups.