The Right Backups Help Businesses Power Through Interruptions

“In a worst-case scenario — if Armageddon happens — we know we’ll be able to get our data,” Baidoo says. The solution combines NetApp network-attached storage servers with backup technology from Veeam. The Veeam software connects to the company’s file shares and virtual machines to create snapshot copies of the data on those systems. These backups are then sent to Xtera’s NAS servers, which replicate the data to the cloud and to other NetApp systems on-premises and offsite.

Baidoo receives regular emailed reports from Veeam to verify that his backups are running correctly, and NetApp sends him an alert if any links between servers need his attention. “With security, it’s not one thing that’s going to help you sleep at night,” he says, “but it’s good to know that your systems are working.”

When Xtera was hit with ransomware targeting a security vulnerability in one of its products in 2021, it was this backup solution that ultimately prevented the attackers from getting what they wanted. “It could have been a lot worse than it was,” Baidoo remembers. “We lost a few hours of work at one site, but our backups were ready, and our data was safe.”

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How To Develop a Comprehensive Backup Strategy

A 2024 survey of more than 1,000 IT leaders by Commvault found that 83% of organizations had experienced a material security breach, with half occurring within the year prior. “It’s no longer about whether the attackers will get through,” says Bob Arnold, president of Disaster Recovery Journal. “When that intrusion happens, what are you going to do about it?”

While businesses face a variety of data-loss threats, from accidental deletions to hardware failures and natural disasters, it’s the growing threat of ransomware that has company IT leaders most concerned, Arnold notes. By one estimate, about a third of all data breaches now involve ransomware and similar forms of cyber extortion. “Without a comprehensive backup strategy in place, you’re not protected,” he says.

The best solutions, Arnold explains, combine air-gapping and immutability. The approach leverages zero-trust user authentication measures to prevent data from being altered or deleted, and doubles down with physical isolation of the backed-up data in a storage system separated from the main network. He also suggests fortifying business continuity strategies through information sharing with industry peers and recommends working with company executives and employees to “continually improve and foster a culture of preparedness.”

One IT leader who’s happy he prepared for the possibility that his organization might suffer a serious breach is Matthew Prieto, director of infrastructure and security with California Dairies. One early morning last January, the milk marketing and processing cooperative suffered a catastrophic failure via a compromised system.

Thanks to the business continuity plan, Prieto and his team took back control of their infrastructure in about two hours and restored their core business functions within 37 hours, Prieto says. That’s important, he notes, because the organization moves millions of gallons of milk each day. “A day lost is a very big deal, and it’s the reason we go above and beyond with our backups.”

The organization relies on a pair of solutions from Veeam — Veeam Backup & Replication and Veeam Data Cloud — to protect its on-premises virtual environments and its Microsoft Azure data, respectively, Prieto explains. It has nearly 300 virtual servers spanning more than 20 locations throughout California, and with Veeam, each repository is separated from their network and protected through encryption and other security measures. “Even if you managed to get access to one, you wouldn’t have access to the rest,” he says.

Created in 1999, California Dairies has grown significantly over the years. The organization’s systems house everything from real-time data from their plants and distribution centers to employee records and financial information, Prieto says.

“We’d always been told, ‘You’re a dairy, why would you worry about being attacked?’ We know now that it’s not about what we do, it’s about the attackers looking for opportunities.” Today, he adds, the company focuses on data diligence to minimize the chances that future attacks will succeed: “It’s how we stay ahead, and backups are a key part of that.”

Hackers Will Attack Any Business

The bad actors evidently thought they spied an opportunity when they attacked the systems at Betenbough Companies in 2021. With offices in several West Texas locations, the diversified holding company encompasses half a dozen businesses, including a home-building firm and a Lubbock café.

Betenbough IT Systems Engineer Chad Byrd remembers the morning four years ago; he started getting alerts around 4 a.m. “My phone was just going crazy,” he says. “When I finally made it onsite to see what was going on, I saw the ransom note they’d left on the desktop on one of our servers.”

The good news: He and his colleagues had a disaster recovery plan tested and in place. Working with Druva  — a company they’d turned to a few years earlier for its Software as a Service-based backup solution — they were “up and operational in 24 hours and back in business again,” Byrd says.

At the time of the attack, Betenbough’s software engineers had been moving production workloads into Azure. Today, the Druva backups for those applications are air-gapped from the company’s systems and stored safely in Amazon Web Services. “We like the idea that our Azure environment is housed in another location,” Byrd explains. “And our on-prem environment is also backed up separately, automatically in a couple of hours each night.”

Like Matthew Prieto at California Dairies, Byrd describes Betenbough’s ransomware adventure as not only challenging but eye-opening. He’s proud of the work his team did to quickly restore the company’s operations, and he says that they’ve learned from the experience.

“I’m not happy that it happened, but we grew from it,” Byrd notes, explaining that the attack shaped how his team thinks about security and business continuity today. “Before, we thought, we’re a little home-building company, we’re not that important, nobody’s going to target us. We don’t think that anymore. They’re targeting anybody that they can.”

Byrd adds that the Betenbough IT team is now “more vigilant” than ever before. They know that the company, like any other, will face new attacks in the future, and so they have their defenses positioned and their backups secured. “It’s important for us to be ready and alert,” he says. “We have to be prepared.”