Preparing for a cyber-attack: Protecting public sector IT infrastructure with Zerto

[Tony_Walsh]

When thinking about protecting your IT infrastructure, it’s vital to recognise the range of potential issues your organisation could face. Here at HPE, we help public sector organisations understand the risks of cyber-attacks and other IT related issues and offer encryption detection, continuous data protection and rapid recovery with Zerto, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company.

Watch the webinar here

Ransomware – ‘when’, not ‘if’

Ransomware attacks have become the new ‘natural disaster’ – they are now more likely to occur than the more traditional ‘natural disasters’ like a major data centre problem or suffering other types of IT failure. In fact, the Crowdstrike incident in July has thrown up another interesting challenge in terms of the business interruption caused by the rollout of a security update.

With the rising risk of cybercrime impacting organisations, we’ve seen the public sector hit, specifically with attacks on healthcare, potentially putting lives at risk. The 2017 global WannaCry ransomware incident impacted 30% of NHS Trusts and lasted four days, and in 2021, a ransomware attack targeted the Health Service Executive in Ireland, putting public data at risk of publication and causing major disruption to services. More recently we have seen the disruption caused in the London area by the cyber-attack on the joint venture pathology service supporting a number of NHS Trusts and local primary care services.

It’s predicted that by 2031, the total cost of ransomware will hit $265 billion, globally. With this being the case, it’s essential that public sector organisations are aware of the risks and are taking action to prepare.

Understanding the challenges

Data protection and disaster recovery has historically been seen as the role of IT within an organisation and typically has been delivered using traditional backup/recovery software. This approach, whilst necessary and providing a valuable service around long term retention/archive and for compliance, has several drawbacks. Firstly, the amount of data lost in the event of a recovery operation will usually be measured in hours. Secondly, and of more significance, the actual time to recover at scale to an operational state will typically be measured in days. Add to this the growing trend for ransomware attacks to target and compromise backups and the problem gets compounded.

In tandem we need to consider the service level agreements in place between IT and the lines of business. When were they set and when were they last reviewed? Were they set based on what the business really needed, or more importantly now needs, or based on what IT could deliver at the time? It is imperative that there is a common understanding and agreement across the organisation from a senior leader, business and IT perspective around how long it would take to fully recover from a major incident and whether that really meets the operational needs of the organisation.

A recent announcement brought the encouraging news that the government is prioritising the increasing cyber threats to the UK's critical systems. The new Cyber Security and Resilience Bill marks a significant milestone, introducing measures to strengthen IT infrastructure against malicious attacks and addressing regulatory constraints. This legislation aims to make successful attacks more challenging while improving response and recovery capabilities.

Finding a solution

With increasing risk of a cyber-attack, many business leaders are, quite rightly, focused on prevention. However, we must understand that it is becoming a case of ‘when’ and not ‘if’ a cyber-attack will occur, so equal focus must be placed on how you can rapidly recover your business operations, should the worst happen. Zerto provides continuous data protection with ‘real time’ encryption detection. This enables an organisation to immediately be alerted of any anomalous encryption activity as well as identifying exactly which servers are impacted. Quickly identifying this ‘blast zone’ enables the disruption to be limited and the impacted servers to be recovered in minutes to a point seconds before the encryption started.

In addition to the capability described above, Zerto has introduced a further level of protection and recovery from a cyber threat. This is in the form of the Cyber Resilience Vault which provides a fully physically air-gapped and immutable recovery environment built on production grade hardware. This ensures the ultimate guaranteed recovery of last resort in the event of a catastrophic incident.

Zerto is platform agnostic and works across virtualised on-premises, public cloud and hybrid cloud environments in the same way, ensuring all critical applications and data can be covered.

Public sector services are crucial in the day to day lives of citizens, affecting many vulnerable people and dealing with highly sensitive data. A rise in cyber warfare has the potential to cause harm to any service, and a robust, reliable, rapid recovery solution is essential.

Watch our Zerto webinar to find out more

Tony Walsh
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

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