Global ransomware attacks soared in 2021, with the world seeing a dramatic 105 percent surge. The outlook wasn’t much better in North America, with breaches rising a similar 104 percent. These numbers are frightening, and will likely only increase as remote employees continue to work outside of their office networks and bad actors hone their skills.

So, what are we doing wrong? What has become clear is that no level of high-tech prevention will thwart these attacks. We must assume that cyber criminals will almost always find a way to get in, oftentimes through human vulnerabilities or mistakes such as downloading infected files or falling prey to phishing scams. Organizations have no choice but to shift their focus from prevention to protection by strengthening their cloud backup strategies.

There are a number of reasons why backups fail. Sometimes IT teams make the mistake of storing their backups on-premise where their data is essentially as exposed as their primary data set. Other times the data may have been backed up but not the application, or the backup itself was not fully complete. These blunders will quickly be identified and taken advantage of by cyber-criminals, leaving organizations in an unpleasant ransomware predicament. But there are a few basic strategies that can be leveraged to help strengthen cloud backups and mitigate the effects of these ransomware attacks.

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