Cyberattacks don’t just disrupt organizations—they disrupt lives. Over the past year, ransomware attacks have crippled hospitals, banks, schools, and government agencies, impacting the patients, citizens, students, and staff who rely on them.
To combat ransomware, your agency must do more than be compliant with cybersecurity rules and data backups requirements. Even with significant investment in traditional defenses, no agency can stop every attack. Prevention alone isn’t enough. Protecting data integrity and ensuring operational continuity requires a proactive shift in strategy. The joint FBI and CISA warning about the Ghost ransomware group underscores why this change is urgent.
To defend against attacks, avoid disruptions, and recover faster, your agency needs a robust cyber resilience strategy. But delivering true cyber resilience requires new collaboration between key players on your agency’s IT team. Rubrik can help you bridge the gap between backup administrators and cybersecurity teams to help cut costs, strengthen resilience, and safeguard mission-critical data.
Closing the Organizational Gap
Data is your agency’s most important asset, and the future of cybersecurity is data security—if your data is secure, your agency is resilient. To secure your agency’s future you must take the following actions :
Implement network segmentation, timely patching, and multi-factor authentication (MFA)
Ensure critical systems and data are immutable and survivable
Establish rapid recovery measures to minimize downtime after an attack
Leverage backup solutions with logical airgaps which isolate your backup data
These functions are often siloed within government agencies. Security teams most likely don't know the backup solution for their environment until a cyberattack occurs, though they should be aware that legacy backup tools were not designed for today's cyberattacks. Cyber threat actors routinely exploit this organizational gap to gain access to primary and backup data.
So breaking down the silos between federal backup administrators and cybersecurity teams must be a crucial first step to getting this work done and protecting your agency against ransomware threats.
To address the silo issue, agencies should establish quick threat-hunting protocols to detect backup data vulnerabilities and malicious activities, which will give cybersecurity teams better insight into backup infrastructure and reveal hidden threats that live systems might not.
You should update your disaster recovery requirements, ensure rigorous backup testing, and conduct table top exercises with all stakeholders within your agency. Include your technology partners because they might have ransomware recovery teams. Adopt an “assume breach” mindset with zero-trust strategies. These proactive approaches are essential for swift data recovery from future ransomware attacks.
Stay Ahead of the Threat with Rubrik Cyber Resilience
When a cyberattack threatens an agency, its reputation, and citizens' or sensitive data, Rubrik provides the power to bounce back quickly.
Rubrik Security Cloud Government (RSC-G) can help protect your agency combat ransomware through zero-trust architecture, immutable backups, encryption, and continuous threat monitoring. These capabilities enable rapid recovery and prevent malware reinfection.
Zero trust means no user or device is automatically trusted, and access is verified at every stage. Immutable backups store backup data in an unchangeable format, which means they cannot be altered or deleted, even by ransomware.
Think of Rubrik as your last line of cyber resilience, keeping data secure, monitored, and cleanly recoverable everywhere it lives. We use the following guiding principles to design our RSC-G platform and products:
SECURE: Data Protection means that data remains readily available. Logically air-gapped, immutable, access-controlled backups enable you to withstand cyberattacks, malicious insiders, and operational disruptions.
DETECT: Data Observability requires you to understand the risks to your data. Proprietary data risk assessment and anomaly detection engines enable you to continuously monitor risks like sensitive data exposure, spillages and detect cyber threats like ransomware and encryption events.
RECOVER: Data Remediation means being able to quickly return to business as usual. Automation and quarantining enable you to contain threats and rapidly recover your apps, files, or objects while avoiding malware reinfection.
UNIFIED PLATFORM - ARCHITECTURE AND UI: Rubrik offers a single software platform that provides centralized data management, backup, recovery, archival, compliance, and cloud data management across data centers and clouds, all in one secure fabric. This ensures a fast, secure, and clean recovery so you can return to operations quickly.
Cloud Migration is Safer, Cheaper With Rubrik
As your agency increasingly adopts cloud services, we know you are encountering the challenge of escalating costs associated with cloud storage. Native backup tools make it easy to deploy, but they are not optimized for cloud storage costs, and are usually workload specific.
Moreover, managing data protection across multiple clouds, accounts, and services within those accounts is both time-consuming and operationally complex. Relying on scripting for automation is not a sustainable solution due to its fragility. Even minor changes in the application or environment can cause scripts to fail, requiring significant maintenance and rework.
Slow recovery is not suitable for the delivery of government services and can cause significant financial loss. The global average cost of a data breach in 2024 was $4.88M—a 10% increase over last year and the highest total ever. Government IT operations cannot afford to take days, weeks, or months to recover from a cyberattack because they may not know what was impacted or what files to restore or have trouble getting the appropriate data to restore.
Rubrik can send backup data directly to lower tier, lower-cost cloud object storage, bypassing the need to store snapshot copies in more expensive storage tiers. Additionally, our RSC-G platform can identify redundant data for exclusion from storage and backup operations to save on costs.
Can Your Cyber Defenses Withstand the Next Attack?
Resilience is all about getting knocked down and disrupted but being able to get back up and running in a safe and trusted good state quickly. By ensuring sensitive data has the correct security and access controls and maintaining your backups, you gain complete confidence in your agency's ability to recover rapidly.
Backups alone won’t stop ransomware. Only a full cyber resilience solution can protect your agency. Schedule a demo today to learn how to keep your agency’s data secure from cyber threats.