On August 18th, a cloud hosting company called CloudNordic had their systems compromised. Their servers were encrypted with ransomware, and they won’t or can’t pay the ransom to get their data decrypted.
Not a problem, you might think – they’ll just restore from the most recent backup. Customers might lose some transactions, but it won’t be so bad. For whatever reason, CloudNordic have been unable to restore data, as per this quote from their announcement on the breach:
Unfortunately, it has proved impossible to recreate more data, and the majority of our customers have thus lost all data with us.
That’s pretty horrifying – customers have lost web applications, email, and who knows what other data.
This is a teaching moment – Schofield’s Second Law of Computing states that:
Data doesn’t really exist unless you have at least two copies of it.
The “law” is intended to explain that having just one copy of your data is incredibly dangerous. Going further, most business continuity experts will advocate having at least 3 copies of data, with incremental backups. This will allow you to restore from at least 2 different sources, and go back to older backups in case the more recent backups have corruption, malware, etc.
As a web development agency based in Mallow, and serving Cork , we know that our clients are price-conscious, but also that losing their brochure site, web-app or ecommerce site, could be very damaging event for the business.
Fortunately, our premium backup-focused cloud hosted solution is very affordable, and provides a copy of the website on the hosting, host backups nightly with 30 days of retention, and offsite backups with 30 days of retention.
It also comes with features that aren’t found on traditional shared hosting, like fast loading speeds, automatic software updates with automatic rollback in case of issues, and the ability to make staging sites to add features without affecting the live site, The features can then be pushed to live when approved.
What is the backup regimen for your website? If you’re not sure, we’re happy to do a free consult. We don’t hard sell – we provide the facts and you can decide what to do with them. Contact us today!