Microsoft cloud users protect their business against ransomware in the cloud

How to protect your business against ransomware attacks.

Posted 06 January 2023 by Laura

In just the first half of 2022, there were 236.1 million ransomware attacks worldwide – and a whopping 623.3 million attacks 2021.  Here are our top seven things to do if you think your business could be at risk of a ransomware attack:

1) We’ve said it once, we’ve said it twice…and we’ll probably never stop saying it. Multi-Factor Authentication. Go now, set it up… (it comes free with any Microsoft Azure tenant). Microsoft recommend this as the single most important deterrent against attacks. Authentication via user identities is the first line of defence.

2) Back it up, baby. Making sure your data is backed up and, crucially, that you have an incident recovery plan in place. Having the steps already laid out, will, in the event of an attack, make restoring your data so much easier. Test your backup recovery regularly and, most importantly, isolate your backups – they can be hit with ransomware, too.

3) Centrally managing your organisation’s devices ensures that only applications, trusted by you, can access your environment. Secure configurations to servers and end user devices will restrict the options available to an attacker. 

4) Maintaining up-to-date antivirus and software on all the devices in your organisation (yes, even Geoff in admin) increases protection against the latest threats.

5) Keep it clean, folks. Restrict users’ ability to run unapproved software and block dodgy websites. It might seem heavy handed – but your compliance manager will thank you.

6) Inspect, monitor, alert. Actively inspect content within the organisation – keeping a watchful eye on what's going on within your environment allows you to see what's going on and get a grasp of any unfolding issue before too much damage is done. Implementing a SIEM like Sentinel can really help step this up a gear.

7) Use a firewall (or our FWaaS solution) and VPN to run all your traffic through. This will ensure dangerous traffic is kept out while creating a secure network tunnel into your organisation.

To find out other ways to protect your business against threats like ransomware, download our guide: How to avoid the fate of the Death Star.

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