Five Hidden Security Risks You May Find with Traditional Backup Mechanisms

It’s always been important for managed services providers (MSPs) to exercise backup best practices but this has become even more important with the pandemic having reset employees’ expectations around remote work. Up to 74% of professionals believe that remote work is here to stay according to Growmotely, while 16% of companies globally are already completely remote and 40% offer hybrid working. This is proving that WFH looks set to be an ongoing feature of the modern workplace, rather than the temporary fluke that many expected or even hoped it might have been at the start of the pandemic.

This sudden shift to remote work placed a lot of pressure on entities like IT support, internet service providers, and video chat applications that enable remote communication by moving the boundaries. With unprecedented numbers of people working from home and exposing themselves to additional risk via personal computers, unsecured home networks, or potentially unstable internet connections, it’s more important than ever for MSPs and their customers to have a backup and recovery system in place to guard against data loss.

Your customers might think how you back up their data is less important than the fact that you back it up at all, but that’s not true. Your backup method matters because not all backup methods are created equal, and some pose more security risks than others. In fact, using traditional on-prem-only backup mechanisms instead of cloud-first data protection can make your customers (and your own business) vulnerable by way of hidden security risks. Here’s what you need to know.

How do traditional backup mechanisms work?

Your customers might wonder, “What’s the difference between traditional local-first backups and cloud-first backups? Why does it even matter?” Traditional backup or local-first backup refers to the process of copying data and storing it on an onsite device, typically disk drives or NAS devices. These devices are usually plugged directly into the computer being backed up, or connected to the computer using a local area network.

Traditional backup mechanisms are easily accessible and data transfer costs can be low but they also come with a host of other issues. For example, IT staff has to manage and monitor a backup application server and ever-expanding local storage, meaning MSPs must set aside money to fund these staff members and keep them on call. For smaller MSPs with fewer resources, less time, and less money than their larger counterparts, this is a significant disadvantage. Also, traditional backup mechanisms typically don’t scale very well. Adding more local backup storage space is time-consuming and labor-intensive because it requires installing and maintaining more physical hardware and doing so drives up operating costs.

While cloud-first backup won’t eliminate the need for management it will dramatically reduce technicians’ time that needs to be dedicate to this process, ensuring MSPs don’t need to overstretch themselves in terms of staffing in what is already a challenging market. Cloud-first backup also helps remove many of the other pain points as well as providing totally new opportunities for data protection. With data protection built with a cloud-first architecture, only changed data bytes are identified for backup. And unlike image-based backup methods, data movement, and defrag operations are not flagged as data changes, dramatically reducing the amount of data in each incremental backup. The data is then compressed, encrypted, and sent to an offsite cloud storage device, safely out of the reach of ransomware that may be on the local network.  In this scenario, the data protection provider takes care of managing the storage so you can devote more time and resources to value-added customer services.

Cloud-first data protection takes the storage management burden off of you, helping make costs more predictable and manageable. Data can be accessed at any time and from anywhere as long as there is an Internet connection, and security is less of a concern thanks to the end-to-end encryption present in today’s top solutions. With direct-to-cloud backup, you’re better equipped to adapt to a rapidly changing landscape and to secure your customers who are dealing with a newly distributed and remote workforce.

Five hidden security risks with traditional backup mechanisms

Cybersecurity is an MSP’s chief concern when it comes to traditional backup mechanisms. Although having the backup onsite might offer you more direct control over data than what you’d get with a cloud provider, the trade-offs simply aren’t worth it. Here are the top five risks of using traditional local-only backup mechanisms to protect customer data, and how Cove Data Protection helps mitigate or eliminate these risks altogether.

1. RISK #1: NOT HAVING A COPY OF BACKUPS OFFSITE

Traditional local backups use disks to store backup data—meaning data is entrusted to physical media at the customer location that are vulnerable to damage. Small businesses may not fully appreciate proper storage hardware management. For example, if your onsite backup storage happens to be under a water pipe, and that pipe bursts, that data could be lost forever and your local backups rendered useless.

Similarly, there is the threat of natural disaster. If all your backups are stored in the same location as your production data, and fire or floor takes out the facility, you have nothing to fall back on. The results can be catastrophic for a business owner, and for their MSP.

Direct-to-cloud solutions like Cove Data Protection help eliminate the security risk inherent in relying solely on storage media at the customer location. With Cove, private cloud storage is included in your price. Your customers’ data is safely stored in one of N‑able’s professionally managed data centers. If you still want to store an optional local copy of your files for faster recovery, you can do so using the storage hardware of your choice and the LocalSpeedVault feature. If a local disaster strikes, Cove Data Protection helps ensure your customers will be covered.

Arguably, an even bigger risk to businesses today actually comes from the threat of ransomware that attacks everything on the network. Again, Cove can help businesses recover from this because all backup data is stored remotely, safely off the local network. This protects it against encryption by a ransomware attack, and allows a company to quickly recover back to a safe state.

2. RISK #2: HAVING A POTENTIAL SINGLE POINT OF FAILURE

Speaking of hardware risks, there are issues that can come with proprietary backup appliances. They can potentially introduce a single point of failure into the data protection process. If you use a local appliance that aggregates the backups and sends them in one huge chunk to the cloud, any device failure will bring scheduled backups to a halt. If the appliance suffers a hardware failure, or simply reaches its capacity, there is a risk of not discovering the issue until several backup cycles have passed. This can adversely affect your RPO, introducing an unnecessary risk.

Cove Data Protection is not an appliance, and it’s not an aggregator—it’s a direct-to-cloud solution with the option for a local copy of backups that also reside in the cloud. The backup process is not dependent on an appliance, so use of the LocalSpeedVault is optional.

3. RISK #3: BREAKING A LINK IN THE BACKUP CHAIN

Another issue with many traditional backup mechanisms is that they establish chain dependencies. Chains are one method of saving and managing incremental backups, and they can be risky. If recovery of later backups is dependent upon every incremental that came before, a break in the chain can spell data loss. Even if the chain works correctly, the recovery process can be slow and tedious, requiring the system to rebuild every link in the chain from the last full backup.

Cove Data Protection helps eliminate the inherent risk of chain dependencies by using a journal-based method. This approach is less error-prone and aids in efficient and effective recovery. Restoring data from last night’s backup or last year’s archive is equally fast, making recovery readily accessible any time.

4. RISK #4: INABILITY TO TEST

Many traditional backup products do not provide an automated way to test and verify the recoverability of backups. Regular backup testing is the only way to make sure your backups are recoverable, but older systems require manual work and effort to test backups, including dedicated servers or virtual machines. Busy MSPs rarely have time to do this as often as they know they should.

The Recovery Testing feature in Cove Data Protection helps you easily and automatically test recoveries for business-critical servers. Enroll your servers in the recovery testing plan just once, and Backup will automatically test the most recent backup every 14 days, capturing a screenshot of the booted VM and creating reports with no further manual effort. We provide the test environment and VM, capture the results of the successful test, and delete the VM—all without the need for any manual effort from your MSP. This feature helps MSPs ensure their customers’ data is not only safely backed up, but also verified recoverable; demonstrating an even higher level of service.

5. RISK #5: LACK OF ACCOUNTABILITY

If you partner with multiple vendors, accountability can be a concern with traditional backup mechanisms. Old-school methods require three vendors: a backup software provider, a local data storage provider, and a cloud service provider to store a secure offsite copy. If a recovery fails, it can be difficult to determine who’s to blame. Vendors may point fingers, blaming one another, and you may be forced to deal with two or three different support organizations at a stressful time. Cove Data Protection combines backup software and cloud storage into one robust solution with end-to-end accountability. If issues arise, you’ll have one vendor partner and one support team at your service. This way, your staff can spend less time hunting down the source of the issue—and spend more time providing a high-quality experience to your customers.

This short list only scratches the surface. If you use traditional local-first backup methods, you may increase your risk of running into many more avoidable security issues. You can see what a difference using a cloud-first solution can make first-hand by trying Cove Data Protection free for 30 days here. To learn more about backup and backup strategy, check out the Backup & Disaster Recovery section of our blog.