This is not hype! This is reality. Companies across industries get hit with viruses all the time. In the always-on economy, companies rely on 24/7 data availability, so any downtime can severely impact the business. The good news is that with a strong data management solution, you can quickly recover from a disaster without any data loss. Before we dive into how Rubrik delivers that solution, let’s go over what happens during a virus attack.

The Lifecycle of a Virus Attack Before Rubrik

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As the above diagram shows, a typical attack has several phases: you get hit with the virus, your systems are under attack, and your business loses access to the encrypted data. Once it’s detected, your IT team documents and implements steps to prevent the virus from spreading. But since most organizations rely on data to perform daily operations, the data loss you’ve already experienced has a severe impact on the organization.

Unfortunately, for many organizations, a virus’ life doesn’t end with patching the vulnerability. Even with a sophisticated antivirus software, viruses can remain in your system undetected. This often leads to further data corruption and a vicious cycle of attack, recover, and patch. For this reason, many organizations stress the importance of preventing an infection rather than trying to cure. However, even with the best protections in place, no system is immune to an attack.

So, what if you could change this cycle? Let’s see what this cycle looks with Rubrik.

The Lifecycle of a Virus Attack After Rubrik

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Suppose that you’re in the same scenario – a virus bypasses your security measures and infects your system and corrupts your data. Rubrik takes away the pain from the usual cycle since you don’t have to worry about data loss or, in the case of a ransomware attack, paying any ransom. Rubrik delivers immutable, incremental-forever backups built into the platform for point-in-time recovery. That means you can easily restore production back to its pre-infected state without any downtime.

Minimizing the Virus Blast Zone

The biggest immediate threats from a virus attack is that it brings your business offline and requires significant resources to address. However, the endless virus cycle can have long-term effects on the business as well.

Data is not created equal. There’s mission-critical data and non-critical data. When a virus enters a system, there’s no control over which data it will corrupt or delete. With solutions that are unable to restore data to a pre-infected state, the amount of data corruption (what I call the Virus Blast Zone) is potentially much larger. As a business continues to collect data, the virus can continue to spread into these new data sets. This means that once infected, your business is under a consistent threat of being put offline with its most valuable data – even if only non-critical data was initially infected.

With Rubrik’s immutable and incremental-forever backups, the Virus Blast Zone is reduced to the corrupted data prior to the restore. With our Live Mount capability, you can restore this data without rehydration. This greatly reduces your RTOs so you can instantly recover from a disaster. When combining this with Rubrik’s policy automation, backup and recovery takes on a whole new level of protection and simplicity.

Want to learn more? Read the data sheet on Rubrik’s DR capabilities.