Former British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli is often credited with the adage, "Hope for the best but prepare for the worst"—which is just another way of saying that bad things will happen, so better be prepared.

It is yet unclear as to what bad things Disraeli had in mind when he coined that saying, but he might as well have been referring to ransomware. Of course, ransomware was invented only a century after Disraeli first wrote that adage in one of his novels, but the premise of it certainly applies to how organisations must approach ransomware and all cyber threats in general.

Make no mistake; ransomware defence is a critical part of your strategy. This strategy, however, is flawed if you don't have a way to remediate if in case the worst happens—that is, once you are targeted by ransomware. And oftentimes, ransomware attacks “work” in favour of cybercriminals because organisations are now all too willing to pay the ransom rather than risk losing their data simply because they lack ways of recovering such a precious resource.

It won’t be that way if you prepare the right way. And given today’s cybersecurity landscape, the best way to prepare is to accept the reality that breaches will happen, and that recovery is now just as critical as defence and prevention. In short, you need to safeguard your data and applications in a way that will enable you to recover immediately from a ransomware attack or any cyber incident.

Imagine then if you had storage with embedded functions that would ensure you can always recover from a ransomware attack.

That is precisely what the IBM FlashSystem 5000 offers.

Empowering businesses with the fastest, most feature-rich and highest-performing storage families available, the IBM FlashSystem guarantees cyber resiliency through Safeguarded Copy, which is specifically designed to help businesses recover quickly and safely from a cyber attack. It does so by automatically creating efficient and immutable snapshots according to a schedule and then storing them someplace not connected to the servers so as to create a logical “air gap” from malware or other threats. These snapshots can neither be deleted nor altered except according to a pre-planned schedule, thus adding another layer of protection.

In case an attack does occur, IBM FlashSystem 5000’s orchestration software, IBM Copy Services Manager, helps an organisation identify the best Safeguarded backup to use and restore data to online volumes automatically and near instantaneously. That’s because this restore action uses the same snapshot technology as Safeguarded Copy, guaranteeing much faster recovery using offline copies or copies stored in the cloud.

All these are anchored on the zero trust model, which presupposes that threats originate not only from outside the organisation, but also from within. The result is a “never trust, always verify” approach that provides security around every user, device and connection for every transaction, thus covering all potential threats.

Indeed, the former minister was right: Hope for the best, prepare for the worst. Let IBM FlashSystem be central to that preparation, and your organisation will be able to weather the worst if in case things come to that. Click here to find out more.