The security of enterprise networks is a critical priority for all organisations across the public and private sectors, as they are forced to contend with an increasingly turbulent cyber threat landscape. As a result, network teams increasingly find their roles overlap with their organisations' cyber security strategies, with numerous siloed elements now converging.
Software Defined WAN, or SD-WAN for short, is the new big thing in business networking. Everybody's talking about SD-WAN, and about what it can do for businesses. Well, there's no doubt that SD-WAN can do a lot for your business; in fact, we'll be talking about exactly that in part 2 of this 3 part blog series. But before we do that, we need to talk about what SD-WAN can't do. Right now there's a popular misconception among businesses concerning SD-WAN - a misconception fed and sustained by headlines and marketing hype - that could lead them to take damaging shortcuts in incorporating SD-WAN into their business.
Despite the numerous interconnected elements now involved in effective digital transformation, the network remains the foundation of everything, ensuring any investment in new technologies delivers the best possible ROI, and that teams at all levels are empowered to deliver their very best, 24 / 7. As such, the digital transformation journey must always begin with a full network transformation.
Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) represents an elegant convergence of network and security technologies as a single, end-to-end solution, perfectly suited to the modern distributed workforce and the increasingly dynamic nature of corporate networks. As a growing number of organisations are discovering, SASE has the potential to completely transform the way we design, deploy, manage, and scale corporate networks. Indeed, 60% of IT leaders are ready to fully embrace SASE by 2025*.
Whatever sector you operate in and whatever your long-term business goals, your network is the foundation of your future success. With the distributed workforce now firmly established and customer interactions taking place over an evolving range of channels, business is now truly interconnected, with seamless, secure dataflows its lifeblood.
In Q3 of 2024, the CEO of a UK-based bank received an email from a ransomware group, informing him that the bank's data had been encrypted and would be released on the dark web unless a ransom demand was paid. Although several insurers and consultants were engaged to resolve the situation, the slow response times made it clear that an alternative approach would be needed.
Finally, in order to minimise the resulting downtime and resume operations as soon as possible, without giving in to the criminals' ransom demand, the organisation engaged Exponential-e to restore and secure their critical servers. With even the shortest period of downtime resulting in serious financial and reputational damage, a team of incident response specialists immediately began the restoration process, aiming to have the bank's systems back online in days rather than weeks.
The restoration process began with a thorough audit of the IT ecosystem to establish which servers had been impacted, after which the affected VMs were powered down. A new, fully isolated VDC was created to store these VMs once they were recovered, along with a completely new firewall zone.
With the affected servers restored into this new VDC zone, firewalls were established to allow for the most basic access, after which malware scans were conducted. These scans continued for two days, during which the customer was granted initial access to the servers via a temporary SSL VPN with Azure MFA, allowing them to resume operations in just three days.
At this point, Zerto replication was set up for the new VMs, while Exponential-e simultaneously engaged with the third party that was conducting a forensic investigation.
Connectivity was soon re-established for the customer's other offices, at which point users were brought back online. Firewall logs were provided for the forensic team, along with initial access to VM images via vCloud Director.
Finally, a test rebuild of the affected VMs was conducted and finalised within two days, and additional firewall policies established.
Exponential-e has repeated variations of this process for multiple other organisations affected by ransomware attacks, allowing them to resume operations as quickly as possible and ensure their critical infrastructure is secured against future attacks.
Ongoing communication between all parties involved ,including a dedicated team of incident response specialists at Exponential-e with a defined action plan ensured a seamless restoration process. Day-to-day operations resumed in just seven days, without paying the criminals' ransom demand.
Don't wait for a crisis to expose the cracks, fortify your defences today. Discover how expert response turned seven days of chaos into operational recovery.
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