How secure are your backups?

Backup security is – or rather should be a big requirement in any organisation. Sadly we still see periodic examples of where organisations fail to fully comprehend the severity of a backup breach. In a worst case scenario, a backup breach involving physical theft might be the equivalent of someone having permanent and unchecked access to a snapshot of your entire network.

There are two distinct aspects to backup security to consider:

• Physical
• Electronic

For each type of backup security, we need to consider two key areas:

• At rest
• In transit

This usually leads businesses to start backup security planning by considerations such as:

• Do we encrypt backup media?
• Do we used security guards for movement of backup media?
• Are on-disk backups encrypted?

Oddly enough, there’s a bigger gorilla in the room for backup security that is less often thought of: your backups are only as secure as the quality of and your/their adherence to your security policies.

A long time ago in a state far, far away, a colleague was meeting with a system administrator in the offices of an environmental organisation. She needed to ensure the security restrictions for system access could be drastically lowered from the default install criteria. “Everyone here is an anti-authority hippy” she said (or words to that effect), “If we give them hard passwords they’ll just write the in permanent marker on their monitors.”

The solution was to compromise to a mid-point of security vs ease-of-access.

These days few organisations would yield to their users disdain for authority so readily, but it serves to highlight that a system is only as secure as you choose to make it. A backup environment does not sit in isolation – it resides on the hosts it is being used to protect (in some form or another), and it will hae a host-based presence within your network at some point. If someone can breach that security and get onto one of thoe hosts, there’s a good chance a significant aspect of your backup security protocols have been breached as well.

That’s why all backup security has to start at a level outside the backup environment … rather, it requires consideration at all layers. It doesn’t start with the complexity of the password required to access an administrator interface, and nor does it end with enabling data-at-rest encryption. So if you’re reading this thinking your backups are reasonably secure but your organisation only has mediocre access restrictions to get onto the network, you may have closed the gates after the horse has bolted.