Shaun Searle, Redstor.

Cyber attacks are proliferating and ransomware has become a particularly prevalent threat. Yet many businesses are woefully unprepared to weather the impacts of a ransomware attack.

This is according to Shaun Searle, country manager African Regions at Redstor, who was speaking ahead of a Redstor webinar on the role of managed service providers (MSPs) in helping customers mitigate the risks of ransomware.

Searle notes that cyber crime is estimated to have increased by around 600% in the past year, with ransomware alone costing companies around $75 billion a year.

“It’s difficult to ascertain how many companies actually pay the ransoms, since nobody wants to admit they were exposed to an attack. But those that do pay ransoms often find they only get a portion of their data back, or that there is dormant malware installed in the data they get back,” Searle says.

Most organisations attempt to mitigate the impact of ransomware attacks through off-site backups. During lockdown and with remote workforces becoming a norm, they can experience challenges in getting to the backup site, and may find backups were not done often enough to ensure business continuity. Many others are under the mistaken impression that security and back-up tools are built into their cloud tools, but this is seldom guaranteed, says Searle.

“When – not if – a company falls victim to a ransomware attack, they discover that IP is the business. You can insure the hardware and premises and even sometimes the staff, but the IP, knowledge and data is the most important asset of most organisations. It is crucial to lock it down and ensure you can get back to the most recent restore point.”

“The big issue in recovering from a ransomware attack is the ability to recover data from a clean source, so you need a solution that moves data to a highly secure offsite facility with multiple, flexible restore points,” he says.

Searle says this is where Redstor is seeing significant growth in markets around the world, as organisations look to its data management platform with 4-in-1 Backup and Recovery, Archiving, DR and Search and Insight. MSPs working with Redstor are using their trusted advisor status to help their customers mitigate risk and limit the disruption of ransomware attacks, he says.

“Most MSPs will already have a partnership in place with some sort of data management product; but I don’t think there’s another partner offering the overall level of support Redstor does. We have grown our managed services portfolio hugely in the past two years, to help MSPs derive value and decrease their customers’ risk. It’s not just the advanced technology we deliver, but also the backup, support, sales and marketing involvement; right down to supporting MSPs in the field in calls with customers,” he says.

Redstor, in partnership with ITWeb, will host a webinar for MSPs on changing ransomware trends, the risks to customers, and the opportunities for MSPs to help businesses avoid ransomware fallout.

For more information, and to register for this webinar, go to:

https://www.itweb.co.za/webinar/redstor-mps-why-ransomware-may-be-the-biggest-opportunity-in-2021/