Backup and restore: a powerful data duo

Over the past few years, ransomware attacks against state and local governments have grown both in frequency and cost. Baltimore; Albany, N.Y.; Lake City, Fla.; and New Orleans—these are just a handful of cities that have suffered a public ransomware attack.

State and local IT leaders are looking to strengthen their data protection infrastructure. According to a recent study, 54 percent of states are not confident in their ability to address threats from emerging technology. State and local governments are a primetarget for cyber criminals due to their vast troves of personal data. Millions of Americans depend on state and local government services, and the pandemic has only heightened the need to keep operations running smoothly in new capacities over the last year. Citizen needs are continually changing, and state and local governments are looking for solutions that deliver and continue to adapt.

A ransomware attack can strike at any time, and state and local governments must not only focus on prevention, but also on minimizing the impact. The most valuable safety precautions when it comes to data are backup and recovery.

State and local IT leaders must consider their storage platform’s data backup and recovery capabilities, as it is essential for governments to quickly move through the remediation process and restore data after an attack. Having the fastest possible recovery time helps governments to avoid significant organizational and financial impacts so they can continue serving citizens.

March 31^st was World Backup Day, an optimal time for governments to evaluate their backup practices, and double down on securing critical information. With smarter hackers and more advanced technology, state and local governments must invest in their infrastructure to keep citizens and their information secure.

State and local governments need an infrastructure system that prioritizes both backup and recovery. While backup remains at the forefront of IT leaders’ minds, rapid restore is just as important—and backup is of no real use if the data can’t be restored quickly. Like data, time is extremely valuable when recovering from an attack. Failed backups, corrupted data and slow restoration hurt state and local governments even more. Evolving ransomware attacks that target backup data and catalogs force reconfiguration of backup solutions even before recovering data. A modern data platform with protection for backups built-in is essential.

State and local governments are doing mission-critical work and cannot afford any amount of downtime. Rapid restore is essential to protect against the effects of ransomware attacks. Recovery point and recovery time objectives ensure that they can avoid major operational and financial impacts, protect critical data, and stay focused on the mission.

To achieve swift recovery, state and local IT infrastructures must be built around a modern data experience, meaning storage should be easy to set up, manage and expand, as well as integrate easily with existing backup software. Of course, it must be fast—restoring data and applications quickly enough to actually matter. It should also be seamless. This experience can span any protocol, any tier of service level and multiple clouds in a single environment. Lastly, it should sustain performance as data volumes increase.

Having consistent, real-time access to data is critical for state and local governments, and in the event of an attack, they must be able to recover data at scale, as quickly as possible. Modern data protection is fast, simple, and cost-effective and can help prevent the devastating effects of cyberattacks that could reduce productivity, cost millions, threaten mission-critical work or create a lapse in essential citizen services.

Michael Wiseman is the vice president, U.S. Americas SLED, Pure Storage, leading the sales team responsible for state, local and education customers in the United States. In his current role, Wiseman is responsible for developing a team to enable the transformation of how public sector customers protect, serve and educate their constituents by leveraging technology to connect, innovate and lead. Prior to joining Pure Storage, Wiseman spent 17 years at Cisco.