This week, we added a new point-in-time recovery feature which offers our clients an easy way to leverage their HubStor cloud archive to recover from unfortunate ransomware attacks.

Ransomware is a type of malicious software that blocks access to files until a sum of money is paid. The malware can encrypt vast amounts of data on enterprise file systems.

According to security research by Microsoft, half of the world’s reported ransomware incidents occurred in the United States between December 2015 and April 2016.

To have better protection against ransomware, IT leaders need to improve their data protection strategy. This means a move away from relying purely on traditional backup approaches which can be expensive and problematic at scale.

In recent months, we have helped several IT pros that were struggling with traditional back approaches. Before a file archiving strategy, they were keeping hoards of low-touch and inactive data – although still valuable to the organization – on their file servers which caused challenges with normal backup and recovery procedures.

As ESG Senior Analyst Jason Buffington elegantly articulates in this short video, archiving has a deep, multi-pronged value proposition that can apply to any organization. One of the main advantages with archiving is that it shrinks the size of your primary storage by transparently tiering off what’s no longer active data. One of the ways you can leverage HubStor is to think of Azure as your secondary storage tier, and HubStor will ghost policy-targetted items in your primary storage, making it seamless to users and applications when data has been tiered safely into the cloud.

By reducing the storage footprint on primary, your backup software has less work to do. And now, if you experience a ransomware attack, you have better recovery options.

First, if you recover from your backup, recovery times are much shorter because most of the inactive data is now ghosted. When you recover archive pointers from your backup, the ghosted data continues to point back to your data sitting safely in your HubStor archive on Azure.

But now, with our point-in-time recovery, you also have the option of leveraging your HubStor environment to recover file server data to a healthy state.

“Many of our clients have experienced ransomware first hand in their past,” said Greg Campbell, CTO, HubStor. “We are excited about adding data protection and recovery features that can help our clients be more resilient to attacks.”

Recovering data from the cloud may not always be feasible, particularly when the network connection is slow, and there is a significant amount of data to egress.

HubStor plans to enhance further its recovery feature set this year to help organizations with slower network connections to benefit from the cloud in this way.

You can read the press announcement on the new point-in-time recovery capability here.