Enhancing Network Security: Best Practices for Data Backup Procedures

Frequent Automated Backups 
Frequent Automated Backups may seem like a simple, regular process that could be postponed or overlooked; however, frequent automated backups form the backbone of data recovery because an organization can only duplicate, protect, and test the data it has in its possession. A rolling weekly backup with daily partial backups that contain the updates since the last partial or full backup protect organizations from data loss. On complex projects, even minimal data loss can cause a significant impact to business operations. 

Protect Recovery Data 
Encrypting backup data protects an organization’s sensitive information from being immediately visible when a malicious actor gains unauthorized access to backup storage.

Data Separation
Recovery data should be kept completely separate from primary data to protect an organization from malware infections across datasets, hardware failures, and natural disasters. Storing data in multiple secure locations provides redundancy in the event of unanticipated natural disasters. A reasonable solution for most organizations is Network Segmentation, VLANs and Firewalls for data separation. In extreme cases such as Government Defense, Air Gapped Networks provide a stronger solution than VLANs in ensuring data separation, and Data Diodes provide a stronger solution than firewalls when facilitating data transfer in a mature organization with an advanced budget. 

Establishing a secure standard for Data Recovery Procedures

According to the CIS Control 11, comprehensive implementation of Data Recovery Procedures should include:

  1. Establish and Maintain a Data Recovery Process
  2. Perform Automated Backups
  3. Protect Recovery Data
  4. Establish and Maintain an Isolated Instance of Recovery Data
  5. Test Data Recovery

Through categorized security implementation groups, the CIS Control 11 recommends a minimum standard of 1-4 for smaller organizations and a standard of 1-5 for mid-sized to mature organizations.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

SalonAboutBeauty: Less Integration for Consistent Styling Across Components

Ensuring Consistent Variables Less provides several advantages for organizing CSS to ensure consistency across a website. The variables.less file defines reusable properties that allow a developer to easily communicate and maintain styles according to a style guide or theme.  The Less Web Development Cookbook describes properties in the variables.less file in relation to other programming languages: “Variables in Less are defined as the equivalent to statics in other programming languages. You assign a value to a variable once and use it everywhere in your code” (Meyghani & Jobsen, 2015, p. 50). It suggests that less allows a developer to set properties, such as colors and length, to variable names that retain their meaning and can be used everywhere in the code. Examples: @base-color: red, @primary: green.  By providing these definitions in a central location, developers create code consistency in all areas of the website. Creating an Organized File St...
Read more

Why “Human Error” Is Usually a System Design Problem

In complex systems, failure rarely comes from a single bad decision. It comes from problems that evolve slowly, cross boundaries, and remain unresolved while everyone involved behaves reasonably. Managing risk in these environments means managing trajectories, not just incidents. When ownership is divided strictly by role, function, or severity threshold, gaps are inevitable. Those gaps are where issues linger, age, and quietly accumulate risk, not because they were ignored, but because no one was responsible for carrying them forward end to end. This is common in healthcare, where delay is often necessary. A patient may require observation, referrals, or time to clarify diagnosis. The failure is not that care takes time; it is that the trajectory of care becomes fragmented. Each clinician escalates correctly within scope, yet no one owns the evolving picture across visits, domains, and decisions. The patient is evaluated repeatedly, reassured locally, and sent away without continuity ...
Read more

Challenges in Prosecuting Deep Web and Darknet Crimes: The Case of Ross Ulbricht and the Silk Road

  The deep web represents online information that is not easily accessible through search engines. Prosecuting crimes on the deep web is no more challenging than prosecuting crimes for any standard website because law enforcement can still track the user's location through a domain or IP address. Alternately, the darknet poses a challenge for law enforcement to address illicit activity because while the darknet is a web-based system, it is accessible only through the Tor protocol that encapsulates HTTP and HTTPS traffic, much like a VPN that hides a user’s location and identity. The Tor protocol, often called the Onion Router, contains methods for encrypting and routing traffic between peers. The purpose of the Tor protocol is to make web browsing anonymous by routing each request through multiple peers and altering encryption at various steps until the request reaches its destination. Subsequent requests may hop through different peers, making traffic appear random, unpredictable,...
Read more