"Criminals Unleash a Viking Fury on CloudNordic, Obliterating Servers and Client Data."

Today, cloud computing is no longer an option but a necessity. Organizations are turning to the cloud to reduce costs and deploy resources quickly to meet business demands. This swift shift means products hit the market faster, benefiting businesses and consumers alike.

It's amazing to note the sheer scale of businesses migrating to the cloud. KPMG reports 90% of businesses see their cloud adoption as 'advanced', with 73% migrating core workloads. Gartner predicts a jump in consumer spending on public cloud services, from $490.3 billion in 2022 to $591.8 billion in 2023. This surge means more data outside traditional defenses and more responsibilities for businesses to shoulder.

With vast amounts of data transitioning to the cloud, cybersecurity cannot be an afterthought. Despite the cloud's convenience, many mistakenly believe that storing data there means they've handed over all security responsibilities to the cloud provider. This perception is a dangerous myth.

The truth is, as organizations digitize and migrate to the cloud, the threat landscape also evolves. There's a heightened need to ensure data is safe, whether at rest, in use, or in transit. A holistic approach to security is vital, covering all data across cloud infrastructures. Businesses must ensure proper configurations, setups, and data protection measures are in place.

Cloud providers are responsible for the security of the cloud itself, but you are responsible for securing anything inside of the cloud.?This includes data, user identities, and access privileges.?Cloud providers take many security measures to protect your data, but there are still risks of cyberattacks.

Unfortunately, many companies lack a deep understanding of the cloud, leaving gaps in their defenses that cyber criminals are eager to exploit. Remember, we all rely on cloud-based tools for emails, documents, and more. If unprotected, these tools become potential entry points for attackers.

In short, as the world moves to the cloud, cybersecurity isn't just a requirement—it's a mission-critical aspect. The choice is clear: either adapt and protect or risk the dire consequences.

Here’s a case in point. On August 18th, Denmark's cloud host, CloudNordic, fell victim to a devastating ransomware attack. The aftermath? Most of their customers' data hosted with them has been lost.

Announced on their website, CloudNordic revealed the attack left them inoperable. Everything from their websites to email systems, customer servers, and more were shut down by yet-to-be-identified cybercriminals.

CloudNordic has indicated they can’t and won’t pay the ransom demanded by the cybercriminals behind the intrusion. The company's IT team, aided by external experts, have been tirelessly working to assess and recover what they can. Unfortunately, they found most of the data irretrievable. Any customer not directly contacted by CloudNordic should assume their data has been lost.

?The company believes the attack's timing coincided with their servers moving between data centers. Infected systems, connected during this period, possibly gave the attackers their entry point, eventually encrypting all server disks, including primary and secondary backup systems.

Interestingly, AzeroCloud, a sister cloud host owned by the same parent company as CloudNordic, suffered an identical attack, indicating a broader targeting strategy.

I would dare say that this could literally spell the end for some of the businesses that put their trust in these cloud providers. As I stated, it was incumbent on them to protect their valuable data. So let me restate this again; you are responsible for protecting data that is stored in the cloud from loss, corruption, theft, and compromise. Approaches to ensuring cloud data security may include technology to protect data from cyber-attack, cyber recovery solutions to recover data after an attack, backup and recovery technology to restore data that is lost or corrupted, and disaster recovery solutions to provide access to data after an outage, a natural disaster or a cyberattack. This sounds daunting right? How can this be accomplished?

Here’s the answer. Dell Technologies has a number of hardware and software solutions for cloud data security, including:

• PowerProtect Data Manager,?software defined data protection, automation, deduplication, self-service, and IT governance for physical, virtual and cloud environments.
• PowerProtect DD series appliances, cloud-enabled backup?appliances that help protect data wherever it lives in the most efficient way possible.?PowerProtect appliances reduce the amount of disk storage needed to retain and protect data and make it possible to complete more backups in less time to reduce WAN bandwidth costs.
• PowerProtect DP series appliances, formerly Integrated Data Protection Appliance (IDPA),?all-in-one data protection software and storage in a single appliance that delivers backup, replication, recovery, search, and analytics. Easy to deploy and manage, they can help consolidate data protection software and hardware for any size organization.?
• Data Protection Suite, a full-featured software solution that supports workloads being protected across multiple environments from core to edge to cloud.
• Cloud Tier, a solution for natively tiering data to a public, private or hybrid cloud for long-term retention. This best-of-breed technology enables only unique data to be sent to?secondary storage?in the cloud, reducing protection storage footprints and associated costs.
• Cloud Disaster Recovery, a solution that allows enterprises to copy backed-up VMs from their on-prem environments to the public cloud for DR testing, DR failover and failback of Tier 2 workloads.
• PowerProtect Cloud Snapshot Manager, a SaaS solution that simplifies protection of workloads in public cloud environments without needing infrastructure or installation. IT teams can use a single tool to protect workloads across multiple clouds and to automate assignment resources to achieve auto scaling in the cloud.
• APEX PowerProtect Cyber-Recovery?solution services in the Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. It means we are available in all three of the major clouds; and it provides customers with the flexibility to recover from a cyber-attack no matter if you are running on-premises, in a colocation facility, at the edge, or a public cloud.

With?Dell Technologies Data Protection?solutions, organizations can be prepared for a?Positive Outcome?in their journey to the cloud.