A GOVERNMENT TECHNOLOGY THOUGHT LEADERSHIP PAPER | COHESITY AND AWS

5 Keys to Cyber
Resilience inGovernment
Simplify data backup andrecovery with the cloud.

As cybercriminals become moresophisticated and focused, data
backup and recovery remains
an important investment for state andlocal governments. According to national
2022 data from the Center for Digital
Government (CDG), 72% of states planned
to upgrade their backup and recovery
technology in 12 to 18 months, while
49% of cities and 44% of counties
planned to do the same.
Backup data and infrastructure are
key targets for ransomware attacks.1 The
number of local governments impacted
by ransomware increased from 77 in 2021
to more than 100 in 2022.2 Governments
need a comprehensive cyber resilience
approach that protects assets, detects
risks, supports response operations, andrapidly recovers data to reduce downtime
and ensure business continuity.
“So many government systems must
be available 24/7,” says Deborah Snyder,
CDG senior fellow and former chief
information security officer for the stateof New York. “Organizations need toaddress outages and recover criticalsystems services quickly and efficiently.
That makes resilience a non-negotiablerequirement.”
Relying on legacy backup and recovery technology can increase cost andcomplexity while limiting flexibility andscalability. This reduces overall cyberresiliency. A smarter strategy uses software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery from acloud-based architecture.
“Cloud brings a whole new meaning
to cyber resilience,” says Dale Zabriskie,
field chief information security officer
with Cohesity, which specializes in data
security and management solutions.

The number of local governments impacted
by ransomware increased from 77 in 2021
to more than 100 in 2022.
This technology can be foundational
for a cyber response plan, compliancerisk policy, and cyber insurance requirements. Five best practices explain why.

1. Simplify and modernize
Many organizations have improved
their backup service-level agreements bymoving from tape to disk-based backup
and replicating backups offsite to meettheir disaster recovery needs. Replicateddisk-based backups are faster than tape
but are still susceptible to attacks, as
they are often on an adjacent network
and accessible through the same user orgroup credentials.
Adding to the complexity, manyagencies use multiple backup solutions
scattered across departments, datacenters, and cloud instances. They alsooften deal with aging backup storage
hardware. Increasing capacity meansincreased HVAC, rack space, and cabling.
Managing these disparate systems iscomplicated, less secure, and more timeconsuming for IT teams.
“I advise agencies to look for an integrated platform approach,” Snyder says.
This simplified route pulls all storageand-recovery operations into a hybrid
cloud-based solution that offers
protection and recovery services foron-premises and cloud workloads.

Such a solution simplifies and automatesdata recovery and isolation through cybervaulting and disaster-recovery-as-a-service(DRaaS), which provides a flexible, secureinterface for data oversight and rapid
recovery automation.
Simplicity provides tangible benefits for
IT departments. For example, IT managers
in Santa Monica, California, spent 90%
less time on data management3 after they
deployed a cloud-based disaster recovery
system with Cohesity and Amazon Web
Services (AWS).

2. Scale and accelerate“Speed of recovery is the one thing thatdifferentiates an organization getting an‘A’ in backup and recovery from those that
get a failing grade,” Snyder says.
Speed and scale must work in unison.
For instance, if constituents pay taxes at
specific times of the year, you will needto scale up quickly for temporary needs
and scale down when those demands
recede. A cyber data resilience program
built in the cloud provides all the scale
you need with services like Amazon’s
Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Relational Database Service (RDS).
Moreover, you can optimize cloud-centered cyber resilience to suit your precise
data management and protection needs,
whether you’re operating on-premisesdata centers or in hybrid or multicloudenvironments. And you can integrate
Microsoft M365 workloads and virtualmachines.
A central data management hub using
cloud-native services can accelerate data
recovery in a fraction of the time you
might expect.
“We had one client that needed us torestore 2,000 virtual machines,” Zabriskie
recalls. “Their recovery goal was fourdays. We did it in 47 minutes.”
Cloud-based recovery can also
provide rapid failover to backups forservices too important to leave offlinefor extended amounts of time.

3. Detect and respond
Firewalls and endpoint management
technologies are mandatory tools, butthey can’t keep everyone out.
Cloud-based data management
provides extra protection for networks,
hardware, workloads, and systems.
Such tools use machine learningbased anomaly detection and threat
scanning so you can respond andremediate quickly. They do this byfinding anomalies in your data, unusual
user behavior, and other risks. All thisactivity appears in logs and data feeds
that can drive an effective analysisand response.
“You want to take all that data and visualize it, see what’s happening, and know
where problems are,” Zabriskie says.

4. Isolate and protect
Resilience requires isolated backups.
One way to make sure you have a clean
copy of your data is to create an air gap
that fully isolates data from a network
and its hardware.
Air-gapped backups are secure
because they are not part of your active
network. They reside outside of yourinfrastructure and can’t be accessed if
your environment is breached. While
tape storage creates an excellent airgap, it’s costly and impractical for recovering critical data on a tight timeline.
With modern cloud technologies, IT
teams can deploy virtual air gaps thatisolate like tape backup while delivering
speed and flexibility.
Cohesity Fort Knox, a SaaS data isolation and recovery solution, illustrates how
this works: High-value data and workload
backups are stored in a separate accountsecured and managed by AWS. Everythingis encrypted into immutable copies thatcannot be changed without direct humanintervention.
“You want controls that give you
total confidence that your datasets areuntouchable,” Zabriskie says.

5. Classify and prioritize
DRaaS platforms allow you to tailor
recovery time objectives (RTOs) andrecovery point objectives (RPOs) to youragency’s specific requirements.

“Classification and prioritization areat the heart of a sound data governancestrategy,” Snyder says. “You need acomprehensive data inventory to identify
the critical systems, understand how theymap back to critical business functions,what data sets are required, and thepeople required for rapid restoration.”
If you want to limit downtime in professional licensing or property tax processing, for example, you can configure
your DRaaS platform’s recovery objectives
to do that. If sensitive personal, medical,
or financial data requires air-gapped
backups, you have that option, too.
Cohesity provides a data classification solution to discover and classify
sensitive and critical data with highly
accurate machine learning-based scanning. This allows you to understand if
sensitive data was potentially compromised and to respond quickly.

Conclusion

A cyber resilience approach should
do more than fend off cybercriminals.
It should also make your IT team more
efficient, ramp up your data management
game, and take advantage of cloud-based
tools that help you recover your dataaccording to the need and situation.
“In the event of an incident, cyber
resilience enables you to be a hero foryour organization,” Snyder says.
This piece was written and produced by theGovernment Technology Content Studio, withinformation and input from Cohesity and AWS.

Endnotes

1. https://federalnewsnetwork.com/commentary/2023/01/as-ransomware-attacks-evolve-agencies-must-find-innovative-ways-to-backup-data
2. https://www.emsisoft.com/en/blog/43258/the-state-of-ransomware-in-the-us-report-and-statistics-2022
3. https://www.cohesity.com/customers/city-of-santa-monica

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