Today’s cyber landscape is riddled with advancing threats. businesses must ensure that the data they collect, use, store, and transmit is properly and thoroughly secured. After all, the data that companies hold is one of their greatest assets, so being aware of the consequences associated with losing that data is essential.

For this reason, we believe that it’s imperative that organizations encrypt their backups. So, what are encrypted backups? What do you need to know about how to encrypt backups?

What is encrypted backup ?

Simply put, an encrypted backup is an additional security measure that is used by entities to protect their data in the event that it is stolen, misplaced or compromised in some way. 

There are various ways to create encrypted backups. If you’re stuck on determining how to encrypt backups , you can start by determining which method is best for your organization by considering factors such as types of data stored, environment types : cloud , hybrid or physical , personal and technical experience, industry, applicable framework requirements and more. 

The most common types of encryption are symmetric and asymmetric. 

• Symmetric encryption : Symmetric key algorithms for cryptography that use the same cryptographic keys for plain text encryption and letter text decryption.

• Asymmetric encryption : Is a form of encryption where keys become pairs. Often, but not necessarily, keys are interchangeable, in the sense that key A encrypts a message, then key B decrypts it and vice versa. With asymmetric encryption, private and public keys form the key pair and both are needed to encrypt and decrypt the data

Importance of encryption

Security is perhaps an obvious reason to start encrypting your backups. 

While common mishaps like losing your device can be disastrous, there are other threats. 

Victims often endure weeks of stressful maneuvering, trying to find out how much of their personal information was compromised. Then, they must attempt to put the pieces of their life back together again which can take months or even years .. 

Advantages of encryption backup

• Encrypting the backup data in a local hard drive can prevent your backups from being accessible to an untrusted party. For instance, if your backup hard drive is stolen, the thief will not be able to access your backups with no the password.

• As we all know, many suggest that cloud storage is not as secure as what we think. Hence, encrypting the backup data on cloud is also a good solution to strengthen the security of backups.

• Encryption prevents Identity Theft and Ransomware Blackmail.

The latest trend in ransomware is to steal all your data which is then used to blackmail you into paying a ransom. If you don’t pay, your data is leaked to the internet, used for Identity Theft or sold to the highest bidder. 

The good news is, if your files are encrypted, the cybercriminals do not have access to your data, instead, they can only see scrambled data which is useless and cannot be held to ransom.

• Encryption protects Lost/Stolen Devices : Employees are increasingly using mobile devices for work. This trend has become more common in recent years, and the COVID-19 pandemic created an explosion in telework and the use of personal and mobile devices.

With the increased convenience of these mobile devices comes higher cybersecurity risk. A smartphone, tablet, or laptop is relatively easy to lose or have stolen in a public place. If this occurs, the thief may be able to read sensitive company data off of the device by scanning it’s hard drive.

File encryption protects against the threat of lost or stolen mobile devices. Each file on the machine is encrypted, and the encryption keys are stored protected by the user’s password. If an attacker doesn’t have access to this password, then they can’t read any useful data off of the stolen device.

Best Practices

It’s not a secret that data is a highly sought-after asset, and malicious hackers and organizations will stop at nothing to get their hands on your organization’s data. 

However, Internal threats are equally as important to consider, but if you’re proactive and implement robust encryption practices to protect your backups and data, you can recap many awards. 

Here are some of our best practices to prevent and protect yourself and your company from malwares, ransomware and cyberattacks . 

• Password : 

Considering the following recommendations when creating a password : 

• Use strong passwords that are difficult to decipher or guess. 

• Provide a meaningful clue to the password that will help you remember the password, the password clue is displayed when you import a file or encrypted tape to the backup server and attempt to unlock it. 

• Keep password safe, If you lose or forget your password, you’ll not be able to retrieve data from backups or encrypted tapes with this password.

• Regularly change passwords. The use of different passwords increases the level of encryption security. 

• Rotate your encryption keys : 

No matter what kind of encryption you implement, symmetric or asymmetric, you have to think about the key rotation. First of all, it is very important to have a mechanism in place to rotate the keys. This might be useful in case of a security breach, and you would have to quickly change keys that you use for backup encryption and decryption. Of course, in case of a security breach, you need to consider what is going to happen with the old backups which were encrypted using compromised keys. They have been compromised although they still may be useful and required as per Recovery Point Objective. There are a couple of options including re-encrypting them or moving them to a non-compromised localization.

• Speed up the encryption Process by parallelizing it : 

If you have an option to implement parallelization of the encryption process, consider it.

Encryption performance mostly depends on the CPU power, thus allowing more CPU cores to work in parallel to encrypt the file should result in much smaller encryption times. 

• Test your backups : 

No matter how you are going to implement the backup encryption, you have to test it. 

First of all , all backups have to be tested. encrypted or not. Backups may be not complete or may suffer from some type of corruption. You cannot be sure that your backup can be restored until you actually perform the restore . That’s why regular backup verification is a must. 

Encryption adds more complexity to the backup process. Issues may show up at the encryption time, again – bugs or glitches may corrupt the encrypted files. Once encrypted, the question is then if it is possible to decrypt it and restore?

You should have a restore test process in place. Ideally, the restore test would be executed after each backup. As a minimum, you should test your backups a couple of times per year. Definitely you have to test it as soon as a change in the backup process has been introduced. Therefore you should make sure you test the whole process after every change.

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