How does the private cloud defeat ransomware?

Defeat ransomware and the criminal gangs that use it by hosting your data and applications on a private cloud server.

Ransomware is designed by extortionist criminals to lock up your critical business data and prevent you from accessing it unless you pay them a ransom. Usually businesses are the target as they cannot function without their data. A detailed definition of ransomware is on wikipedia at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ransomware.

As mentioned on the wiki, ransomware is “designed to lock or restrict the system until payment is made…using strong encryption to encrypt the victim’s files in such a way that only the malware author has the needed decryption key.” Essentially a ransomware infection means the legitimate data owners are without access to their data unless they pay a ransom.

Even though the ransomware has not necessarily stolen the data, its inaccessibility of the data will cause major disruption to the operations of the targeted business costing large amounts of money. Therefore when the ransom is demanded many businesses choose to pay. This in turn highlights them to the international ransomware rings who target them even more strongly potentially resulting in future infections/access restrictions and ransom payments.

However, the private cloud’s ability to backup complete servers in what is known as a “snapshot” and restore the servers as they were at a previous point in time is a major advantage over managing your applications and data on local IT infrastructure.

If Ransomware either locks up the server’s operating system or encrypts the data a private cloud server hosting company like Habitat3 can restore the server as it was just prior to the ransomware taking control. They can also determine what was done to launch the ransomware and ensure it is not triggered therefore completely nullifying the effect of the would be attackers.

Private cloud keeps your data safe in many ways including full server backups and restore capabilities ensuring that you can quickly and easily revert to the way your complete system was at a previous point in time. If anything significant happens to your applications, security, data or database that you wish to reverse it can be done with private cloud servers with full server snapshots in place.