Your backups are now the last line of defence — treat them that way

There’s an uncomfortable truth in every ransomware post-mortem we read: the attackers went after the backups before they triggered the encryption. If your recovery copies can be altered or deleted, you don’t have a recovery plan — you have a hope.

Three questions worth asking today

1. Can anything — or anyone — modify your backups? If a compromised admin account or a piece of malware can reach and delete them, they are not a safety net.
2. How fast can you actually restore? Not in theory. When was the last time you ran a full recovery and timed it against your real recovery-time objective?
3. Where is the off-site, off-line copy? A single repository in the same environment fails the same way the production estate does.

What “good” looks like

Modern backup is purpose-built, not an afterthought:

• Immutability. Recovery copies that cannot be changed or deleted within their retention window, with dual authorization required for destructive actions.
• Deduplication. Source-side dedup (the kind that delivers high reduction ratios) cuts the storage you buy and the bandwidth you need to copy data off-site.
• Cloud tiering. Long-term copies tiered to low-cost object storage, so retention doesn’t mean an ever-growing appliance.
• It works with what you have. The best backup target integrates with your existing backup software rather than forcing a rip-and-replace.

Platforms like HPE StoreOnce bring these together — and the principle holds whatever you run: efficient, immutable, and tested.

The part everyone skips

The single most valuable thing you can do this quarter isn’t buying more storage — it’s proving a clean restore. A backup you’ve never recovered from is an assumption, not a control.

GDS Africa designs backup and recovery that’s efficient and ransomware-resilient, and — crucially — we validate the restores against your real targets so you know they work before you need them.