Title: AWS re:Inforce 2024 - Ransomware & disaster recovery with AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (CFS228)
Insights:
- Ransomware Impact: Ransomware is a significant threat to businesses, causing substantial financial damage. The average cost to recover from ransomware attacks increased from $1.4 million in 2022 to $1.8 million in 2023.
- NIST Framework: The National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST) Framework is essential for mitigating ransomware threats. It includes five pillars: Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond, and Recover.
- Cloud Disaster Recovery Benefits: Implementing disaster recovery in the cloud is advantageous as it avoids upfront hardware investments and allows for flexible, scalable, and cost-effective solutions.
- AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (DRS): AWS DRS is a flexible, reliable, and highly automated service that minimizes downtime and helps quickly recover from disasters. It supports on-premises, hybrid, and other cloud environments.
- Layered Security Approach: A layered cybersecurity approach is crucial to reduce the risk of ransomware. If one layer is penetrated, additional layers provide protection.
- Testing and Preparedness: Regular testing of disaster recovery plans is critical. An untested disaster recovery strategy is ineffective.
- RPO and RTO: Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) are key metrics in disaster recovery planning. Businesses must define these metrics to align with their impact tolerance.
- DRS Features: DRS offers block-level replication, immutable snapshots, and integration with endpoint detection and response systems like CrowdStrike and Sentinel-1.
- Getting Started with DRS: AWS provides a resilience competency partner program, professional services, and a self-service setup wizard for DRS. Training is available on AWS Skill Builder.
Quotes:
- "Paying the ransom doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to get your data back."
- "An untested disaster recovery strategy is no disaster recovery strategy."
- "The right time to implement DR in the cloud is as soon as possible."
- "Migration is a disaster recovery that's not coming back."
- "Make sure it works because you're only going to know when you need it, when you need it."
- "DRS is very flexible, reliable, and highly automated. That minimizes downtime and helps you to quickly recover from any kind of disaster recovery situation."
- "You can recover, you can minimize your RPO using that."
- "There's no lock-in in that. You can still recover back to your on-prem if you want to."