Microsoft Azure Offers Easy Data Recovery Should Ransomware Strike

As scammers step up their efforts to rip off Australian businesses, Microsoft Azure offers a robust backup and data recovery platform to ensure your critical data is safe should ransomware get a foothold in your organisation.

Even with the best business security measures in place, there’s still a risk that malware could sneak past your defences and wreak havoc. Ransomware can spread quickly through your office. It encrypts important data and then demands payment for its release. Thankfully, there’s no need to give into these demands. You can simply wipe your computers and restore from your data backups.

Of course, your backups can only save the day if you’re certain you can rely on them. This is why businesses should look beyond basic cloud storage services to a business-grade platform like Microsoft Azure.

Take advantage of Microsoft Azure

Obviously, ransomware isn’t the only threat to your business data. That’s why Azure puts a raft of safeguards in place to allow for any eventuality.

To ensure data integrity, Azure’s “locally redundant” storage replicates your files three times within a data centre in your local region. There’s also the option of “zone-redundant” storage. This replicates your data to another nearby data centre. There’s also “geo-redundant” storage. This replicates across data centres in different parts of the world to protect your data against region-wide disasters.

Along with making backups of your backups, Azure can also keep your previous backups so you can restore earlier versions of your files, making it easy to turn back time should disaster strike.

This offers a valuable insurance policy should cryptolocker-style ransomware hit your business. It ensures your good backups aren’t overwritten if you inadvertently back up encrypted files to Azure. Once your computer is wiped clean of infection, you can restore your documents from Azure. All it takes is a few clicks and you can pick up working where you left off.

Another of Azure’s strengths is that it can go beyond file backup to protect your servers. It has the ability to back up and restore server workloads as well as Windows Server system states. You can even use Azure Backup Server to create a Bare Metal Recovery (BMR) backup for a physical server. This lets you configure new hardware quickly rather than manually reinstalling Windows and setting all your preferences.

The idea behind all these backup options is to get your business up and running again as quickly as possible. You can reduce downtime and limit the impact of a disaster. Whatever the threat – be it ransomware, hardware failure, natural disaster or simple human error – Azure has you covered.