Best backup and disaster recovery for South African businesses
South African companies should have robust backup and disaster recovery systems to protect their critical data and that of their customers.
Several factors, including power outages, hardware failures, and cyber attacks, can lead to data being lost, making it essential for South African businesses to have some form of redundancy from which they can recover.
Several backup and disaster recovery providers are available to businesses in South Africa, including IBM, Microsoft Azure, Zerto, Arcserve, and Acronis.
If a business is hit with a cyber attack, or if its systems go down due to a power or hardware failure, it can be costly and take a long time to recover without a durable backup and disaster recovery service.
Two prominent examples of what can happen without resilient backup and disaster recovery systems are described below.
Transnet hit with “Death Kitty” ransomware
South Africa’s state-owned ports and freight-rail company, Transnet, suffered a cyber attack on 22 July 2021, forcing the company to declare force majeure at the country’s key container terminals.
Following the attack, Transnet confirmed it was experiencing a disruption in some of its IT applications.
It asked employees to shut down their laptops, desktops, and tablets connected to the company’s domain. They were also warned not to access emails on their smartphones until further notice.
“Transnet, including Transnet Port Terminals, experienced an act of cyberattack, security intrusion and sabotage,” it said.
“Investigators are currently determining the exact source of the cause of compromise and extent of the ICT data security breach or sabotage.”
It was later revealed that the attack was linked to the “Death Kitty” strain of ransomware used to target high-profile companies and was likely carried out by crime gangs from Eastern Europe and Russia.
The Transnet ransom note resembled others recently seen, and Crowdstrike’s vice president of intelligence Adam Myers said the ransomware was linked to strains known as “Death Kitty,” “Hello Kitty”, and “Five Hands”.
Department of Justice hack
The Department of Justice and Constitutional Development (DoJ) was the victim of a ransomware attack that occurred on 9 September 2021 and resulted in all of its systems being encrypted.
A source told MyBroadband that the attackers had demanded a ransom of 50 bitcoin (R33,234,450 at the time). However, the department disputed this, saying no ransom was demanded.
The encryption of the DoJ’s systems meant they were inaccessible to officials and the public and impacted several services, including:
- Bail services
- Payment of child maintenance
- No way to correspond with magistrates or judges — no one can file court papers
- Recording and transcription of court proceedings offline
- Master’s offices
In late September 2021, the Information Regulator notified users that at least 1,200 files were exfiltrated from the DoJ’s computer systems before attackers infected them with ransomware.
Our source said that the attackers had encrypted “everything, including the backups”. It took the DoJ more than a month to get up and running again.
It should be noted that the DoJ was still using physical backups rather than a cloud-based solution.
Some of the best backup and disaster management service providers available to South African businesses are listed below.
IBM cloud backup
IBM describes its cloud backup service as a full-featured, agent-based backup and recovery system.
The company says all data is end-to-end encrypted and undergoes “intelligent compression” and deduplication to reduce its customers’ data footprints.
Editorial credit: LCV / Shutterstock.com
Microsoft Azure site recovery
Microsoft says its site recovery service helps businesses “keep doing business — even during major IT outages”.
It offers replication, failover, and recovery features to assist businesses in keeping their applications running through planned and unplanned outages.
Image: Volodymyr Kyrylyuk / Shutterstock.com
Zerto
Zerto offers one software for several uses, including disaster recovery, backup, and data mobility, both on-premises and cloud-based.
It offers continuous data protection and built-in automated recovery and migration processes.
Arcserve
Arcserve says its Unified Data Protection (UDP) 9.0 software helps businesses protect against data loss and extended downtime across local, virtual, hyperconverged, cloud, and SaaS-based workloads.
The all-in-one product provides data and ransomware protection to neutralise attacks, restore data, and perform disaster recovery processes.
Acronis disaster recovery
Acronis’s disaster recovery product lets businesses automate failovers and ensure that their data, applications, and critical systems are recovered in the order they need them.
Its prominent features include:
- Disaster recovery orchestration;
- Backup-based replication of production machines; and,
- Instant off-site failover to the cloud recovery site.
Editorial credit: Postmodern Studio / Shutterstock.com
Redstor
Redstor’s cloud backup and recovery product offers quick data recovery and protection against ransomware attacks.
The company says its malware detection technology scans all existing backup data and isolates, quarantines and flags any suspicious files to protect against malware attacks.
Nutanix disaster recovery
Nutranix says its disaster recovery service lets businesses prioritise their disaster recovery orchestration to minimise data loss across multiple sites.
The multi-site data recovery solution can enable businesses to recover their data and systems from a simultaneous failure of two or more data centres to maintain continuity.
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