Arthur’s Blog: Secure your Data with NAKIVO Backup & Replication

The problem of data protection has become more and more critical these days. As it is stated in the «Cost of a data breach report 2020» by IBM Security, the average total cost of a data breach has reached $3.86 million last year. Healthcare and financial industries have consistently had the highest data breach burden.

The average ransom paid by victims to hackers rose 33% in 2020 over 2019 and reached $111,605.

According to cybersecurity experts, the cost of ransomware damage will continue to rise. This type of cyber threat is expectAccording to cybersecurity experts, the cost of ransomware damage will continue to rise. This type of cyber threat is expected to be most dangerous for companies and organizations in the coming year.

I’m Arthur Olshansky, CEO and co-founder of Klik Solutions, a global managed IT service provider, and a certified provider of cloud services. The company’s headquarters are based in the USA along with overseas offices in The Netherlands and Ukraine. I would like to share my experience about the most effective strategies and solutions when it comes to ransomware protection and recovery after a successful cyber-attack.

I communicate with business owners and executives on a daily basis. Representing various industries, they are joined by a common task of data protection.  This often means keeping clients’ information safe. That’s why at Klik, we are focusing on providing the most reliable cyber protection for our customers. We rely on our partnership with respected vendors, including data backup and recovery.

Unfortunately, lots of small and mid-sized business (SMB) owners either operate within a limited budget or simply underestimate cybersecurity risks. Quite often they regard their business as too small to become a hackers’ target and such perception creates a false sense of security. In fact, SMB’s are more vulnerable to damaging cyber-attacks. About 53% of small and mid-sized companies become unprofitable within just one month after losing access to critical data and business applications.

We feel that threat awareness is the first step to developing a reliable cybersecurity plan. What’s next? A major initiative that has proven to be an effective way of combating ransomware is regular back-ups. Keep in mind, that even after paying a ransom, a significant proportion of victims don’t get full access to their data and critical applications.

This problem has been around for a while. A decade ago, when me and my business partner, Neil Konstantoulas, founded Klik Solutions, data backup and recovery has been our primary focus. Over the years, we made sure that our customers leveraged a fast, reliable, flexible, and affordable backup solution. We recently have partnered with Nakivo, a company that developed NAKIVO Backup & Replication software. In my mind, it is one of the best options for small and medium-sized companies’ business needs. I’ll tell you more about it.

What is Nakivo Backup & Replication?

NAKIVO Backup & Replication is an easy-to-deploy, comprehensive solution that protects your data in virtual, physical, cloud and SaaS environments. One of its key advantages is an easy installation on Windows or Linux (Virtual Appliance) and NAS. The built-in automation allows for customizing the backup process once and then avoiding the spending of time and resources on the same actions in the future.

An important note: the vast majority of SMBs operate within a limited budget and have to look for a solution that provides a reliable data protection platform.  Nakivo Backup & Replication takes this into account. The flexible pricing model allows you to choose an option for any budget and can reduce backup costs up to 20x.

At the end of October, Klik Solutions held a business breakfast for CEOs, CTOs, and cybersecurity experts. The event took place in Kyiv, Ukraine and we discussed the actual and effective strategies of ransomware protection and recovery.

Yuri Grigoriev, sales and business development director at NAKIVO participated in this event and provided some vivid examples.

Radisson Park Inn in Tallinn (Estonia) has been looking for a reliable solution to protect their VMware infrastructure. According to Roland Kalyurand, IT manager, claims from previous solutions quite often were not as advertised, and backup copies were taking up too much space, increasing storage costs. Now, Radisson Park Inn uses NAKIVO Backup & Replication to protect and restore their critical data. With built-in global data deduplication and compression, Radisson Park Inn Hotel has reduced its backup storage by 3x. “We’ve also significantly accelerated data recovery. We can restore virtual machines from backup storage almost instantly with Flash VM Boot,” says Roland.

Another example has been provided by Stephen Chow, China Airlines, one of Asia’s leading airlines, “We use about 900 virtual machines, so we needed to speed up our backups up. Because of using Hot Add, our backup now takes 10 hours less per week. Also, we are saving about 60% on storage and reducing costs by 30%”.

NAKIVO Backup & Replication solution is used by over 20 000 companies in 162 countries, including small and mid-sized businesses alongside well-known giants such as Coca-Cola, Honda, Siemens and Cisco.

How does Nakivo Backup & Replication protect backups?

To ensure reliable backup’s protection, NAKIVO Backup & Replication offers an immutable local and cloud repository function. The function makes it impossible to delete and change backups for the period specified by the user. NAKIVO Backup & Replication also allows storing backups on physical tape media that are almost inaccessible by ransomware.

Why is it important?

It becomes clear why I pay so much attention to delivering information focused around effective and affordable backup solutions.

There are lots of managed IT service providers operating within the global market. Some of them work within the US market but their tech support is in Eastern Europe. Our business strategy is different at its core. A large portion of our clients have an international presence.  We need to be able to deliver real solutions to address real client needs no matter where the client office is located.  Partnering with Nakivo allows us to do this effectively.