Organizations are continuously looking for ways to improve, from business processes to product innovations all the way down to application security and configuration. They want to ensure they are operating efficiently to meet demand and changing expectations. Security is a priority for IT leaders, they need to keep bad actors out, their applications running, and operations normal. However, even the smartest administrator might miss something, so it’s important to continuously innovate and modify security practices to meet the challenges that face businesses today.
Protecting the Backup Infrastructure
With cyberthreats such as ransomware continuing to be a concern, it is now more important than ever to protect your data. When a disaster happens to the business, they look to their backups for recovery, in a scenario where the backups are compromised, the organization’s ability to continue to operate is restricted. Data and research show that most organizations will see a cyberattack, with some experiencing multiple attacks within a year. So how do we make sure that when a disaster happens, we can recover our data? We need to ensure that the steps taken to strengthen our production environment also extend to the backup environment, so we have a clean copy of data available when needed.
Enter, the Veeam Security and Compliance Analyzer. The security and compliance analyzer verifies your backup infrastructure hardening and data protection approaches against best practices to ensure recovery success. These best practices are based off well-known industry standards and field proven Veeam advice. When the analyzer runs, it checks over 30 different parameters that can be verified to ensure remote access, any use of outdated protocols, and firewalls. By implementing the recommendations, you can take another step in protecting your environment and keeping it resilient.
Since Veeam Data Platform v12, this functionality is available to you on the toolbar. By running this check, it will analyze your backup infrastructure security settings as well as product configuration and then provide recommendations on proper implementations for data protection. By default, this check runs automatically, however you need to remember to continuously look at the results.
As you can see this is analyzing the overall backup infrastructure security as well as the product configuration. Some of the configurations checked include MFA, having an immutable backup, and making sure notifications are enabled. These are all settings that can be easily implemented to increase backup security. For some, these configurations might have been overlooked or not considered but for others this can provide an additional peace of mind. It’s important to note that these checks can be scheduled to run at a certain time and if you need to suppress any certain parameters that don’t pertain to your requirements those options are available to you.
When you think about a robust backup infrastructure, with multiple backup servers, you probably don’t want to have to manage this data independently. You may want to be able to compile this information in one place to analyze all the backup servers and their settings. Or maybe you need proper documentation of the guidelines that you have implemented for compliance reasons. This is where Veeam ONE, a component of the Veeam Data Platform, can help.
Backup Security & Compliance Report
The Backup Security & Compliance report assesses the configuration of all backup servers to guarantee that they align with established security best practices. This helps businesses maintain a robust backup infrastructure helping to increase confidence in their data protection strategy.
To run this report, you will need to open the Veeam ONE Web Client. From there, you can either perform a quick search or you can open the Veeam Backup Overview folder. Once the report is run you gain all the information on the backup servers that are connected to Veeam ONE.
As you can see the report separates the recommendations per backup server, informing you what items have been detected and need to be implemented to strengthen the environment. Throughout the report you can see additional details and recommendations you can perform to make sure the environment is maintaining resiliency to unwanted threats.
Details of best practices and their recommendations are grouped per backup server. This allows you to be able to address passed and not implemented practices. So, if your boss comes to you and asks, “Are we doing everything we can to harden our backup environment? Or how can we make our backup infrastructure more resilient?” you can run this report, configure the proper fixes, and provide documentation of the implementation. This is great in helping meet compliance requirements for your business.
Stay Informed with Alarms
Not only does Veeam ONE provide a detailed report on Security and Compliance state of your backup infrastructure, but it also has corresponding alarms. Alarms are one way to stay informed about what events are happening in your environment. There are alarms for each best practice per backup server, this allows you to receive timely notifications and adjust your environment to meet practice and configuration standards.
This alarm will keep you informed on what needs to be remediated to secure the backup environment in real-time. Additionally, for the most critical alerts it’s important to ensure you have the proper notifications set up, so the correct people get informed about events. To take this one step further, you can automate the remediation and implementation of the recommendations. This can be resolved with just a few clicks through this knowledge base article. We have identified what needs to be fixed within Veeam Data Platform, we have even run a report for compliance and now we have to implement this throughout our robust backup environment. This is made easy through the scripts and information provided in the KB 4525.
Keeping the Backup Infrastructure Secure With the Veeam Data Platform
History and evidence have shown that most organizations will experience a cyberattack. Even with the best defenses in place, threats and unauthorized users are consistently trying to infiltrate your environment and ensure that you are unable to access or recover from backups. According to the Ransomware Trends Report, 93% of cyberattacks targeted backup repositories. This is because threat actors want you to have to pay the ransom, want you to have brand damage and experience loss. The Security and Compliance Analyzer can help identify where unauthorized access can get in, and help you keep them out. With the added alarms and reporting that Veeam ONE provides you can ensure that any key stakeholders know you are doing the best you can to protect the backups, your organization is staying resilient and meeting compliance.
