The volume of cyberattacks that businesses face on a daily basis has increased dramatically. From the SolarWinds hack to the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack, cybercrime is growing in sophistication and using tactics with artificial intelligence (AI) to be more effective with targeted attacks.
Protecting your network and your data is challenging, but it’s vital for businesses of all sizes. That’s why we created this short video demonstrating how to use Veeam’s backup and recovery platform to help your business prepare for cyberattacks, like malware, ransomware, and more.
If you’re still concerned that your business may be vulnerable to a cyberattack, reach out to our team of tech professionals to see how we can help.
Related Article: What the Solarwinds Hack Means to Companies Downstream
READ THE VIDEO TRANSCRIPT BELOW TO LEARN MORE ABOUT VEEAM INSTANT RECOVERY
Mitch, Chief Information Security Officer with Virtual Systems, here today to talk to you about Veeam backup and recovery and how it can get you up and running quickly in any ransomware, malware, or crypto event.
In this day and age, with the way that threats are evolving, it’s not necessarily a matter of if you’re going to get attacked, but when you’re going to get attacked. And having a good solution to get your operations back in the event of one of those scenarios is critical to any business operations. So, I’m going to show you how to do that using Veeam instant recovery to get back on track.
So we’re going to get started in the Veeam console. If you go to disk and find the job that had the VM in it. Here you can also see imported, encrypted, and cloud locations, but we’ll cover that in another video. Once you see that job, you’re going to right click on it and select instant recovery.
And then you’re going to see your backup points. From there you’re going to select the backup point that you want and you’re going to hit next, which is going to bring us into recovery mode, where we usually select restore to a new location so that we can keep the old VM around for forensics.
Then we’re going to go to destination and you’re going to choose your host and the VM folder to restore to. Since we’re retaining the original VM we’re going to rename this one so that we don’t have a naming conflict in VMware.
Select the resource pool if necessary, and I’m going to use low priority pool in this case, which is just a pool that we have. Under destination we recommend setting redirect write cache.
So, redirect write cache is specifying where we are writing that change data. Just like with a snapshot, it is writing a snapshot to a repository to keep it close to your target location. This way we can keep the latency down as low as possible since we’re reading all that data out of a backup location already. This just optimizes the process a bit more. The default location for that mounted backup file is going to be your VBR server, aka your Veeam Backup and Recovery server, but it can be any Veeam managed server.
Under secure restore, you can select to scan the machine for malware if you need to, but we’re going to go ahead and skip over that. Once you go to the restore reason, we usually put the ticket number in, but I recommend putting in some sort of context so that you know If you’re referring back to the logs why you restored that VM.
Then, under ready to apply, you will see your settings and you can select to connect the VM to the network. In our case, we are going to disable that since this production machine is running and completely functional right now.
Once it is done, you will see the instant recovery in your home screen with the status of mounted. You will also have a running task for as long as that instant recovery is running. Once that VM is running, you can interact with it in vCenter or ESXI just like any other VM in your infrastructure.
Related Article: Protecting Your Business Requires Both the Science and the Art of Cybersecurity
As you can see, windows is booting up and it should come up here in just a second. So, in that short amount of time, you can be back up and running from just about any disaster event if you’re restoring a couple machines. This is very largely going to depend on your infrastructure’s capabilities as far as your back end server hardware and your networking and your storage. But Veeam has worked very hard at optimizing this process so that in just about any case you can use this process to recover one or two machines.
This point is where I initiate the VMotion storage migration to move the data to production.
You can migrate the VM through Veeam, but I do it this way out of habit and so that I know it is going to do a live storage VMotion migration.
You will want to migrate that VM to a different data store than where that redirect write cache is being stored.
Depending on your infrastructure, it is best to do this in a maintenance window. However, we have done this successfully during the day because of our robust infrastructure. If you don’t have storage VMotion licensing, you will have to power down the VM to migrate that data. If you are using Veeam to migrate that data, it will do this automatically if it doesn’t see the proper licensing.
When that is done you can go back into Veeam, you can select the instant recovery, and you can select stop publishing to unmount the backup files.
And that’s all there is to using Veeam instant recovery to get you up and running quickly in the event that you’ve been hit by crypto or ransomware.
Now, if you need the ability to restore multiple VMs or you need that guarantee that you’re going to have that data ready to go at a moment’s notice, you’re going to want to look at supplementing your backup strategy with replication so that you have that data written to production storage as opposed to just the backup storage. But we’re going to talk about that more in another video.
VIRTUAL SYSTEMS: BUILDING BACKUP AND RECOVERY SOLUTIONS YOU CAN USE
Understanding Veeam and how its features and capabilities can prepare your business in the event of a cyberattack may feel complicated or overwhelming. Our team of experienced tech professionals would be happy to help. They love to chat with small business owners and other IT professionals. If you have questions or just want to know more, please reach out to our team.
Keep in mind that Virtual Systems also is a VMware premium solution provider, and we offer service on top of the entire VMware Cloud infrastructure. This is an achievement that only 3 percent of all VMware partners accomplish.
From Veeam to VMware and beyond, we can put our expertise to work for you. To learn more, call 844-2-VIRTUAL, email info@vsystems.com, or complete this short online form.
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