Snaking check-in lines. Lost restaurant and show reservations. Manual slot payouts. These issues have been felt across MGM casinos in Las Vegas after the company shut down computer systems due to a “cybersecurity issue.”
A ransomware gang has taken credit for the attack, and while it’s never entirely clear from the outside what a ransomware attack costs a company, there are reports MGM was losing $8 million each day its systems were impacted.
We get these reminders on a seemingly daily basis – that corporate systems can be locked at any moment, that a massive data loss event is always on the horizon. Gartner expects at least 75% of IT organizations to face one or more ransomware attacks by 2025. And many IT leaders today operate with a mindset of “not if or when, but how many times” their organizations will be attacked.
Ransomware has made all-flash data protection a necessity because time is money. Simply having multiple copies of your data is only the first step. You must be able to recover the data in near-real time to limit the impact of any data loss event on your business.
The Cost of Recovery Time
Gone are the days when “meeting the backup window” were the main concern for CIOs and IT admins. The goal today is to be able to recover swiftly, concurrently, and securely from cyberattacks with limited impact to the organization.
Typical data recoveries are time consuming, especially if the data is stored on spinning disks, stored offsite, or requires manual intervention to restore. The complexity of recovery, while still allowing for forensics to determine the customer data leakage, becomes of the utmost importance for all organizations.
One way to accelerate ransomware recovery is to use modern data platforms that leverage advanced technologies such as the VAST Data Platform to not only reduce the costs of keeping data but significantly reduce the time that it takes to accomplish the recovery.
With a clean-slate approach to scalable systems architecture, VAST has flipped the script on what’s possible with data protection and recoveries. By enabling unlimited data processing on affordable flash at exabyte scale, the VAST Data Platform’s restore speeds are upwards of 50x faster than legacy systems, effectively reducing the potential months of ransomware recovery time to mere hours.
Mitigating the Costs of Slow Recoveries
To mitigate the costs of slow recoveries, it’s crucial to have a strategy that ensures fast and reliable recovery times.
Invest in data infrastructure that can handle large volumes of data and provide fast recovery times. The VAST Data Platform can grow infinitely in capacity and performance independently. This ensures that if recovery performance needs to be guaranteed it will not be a trade-off for islands of stranded capacity that results from either dual controller or share nothing scale-out architectures.
Additionally, VAST features like S3 Object Lock and Indestructible Snapshots protect critical data copies from being altered or destroyed, even by inside threats.
Train your employees on data recovery best practices to ensure they understand their roles and responsibilities in the event of a data loss event. Automate your data recovery processes to reduce the risk of human error as much as possible.
But above all, don’t wait to get protected from the scourge of ransomware. Learn more about how VAST Data can help you protect your environment and meet your goals by scheduling a demo, or reaching out to hello@vastdata.com to learn more.
