The Fundamentals of Microsoft Azure

Do not underestimate the importance of cybersecurity. This is best left to the experts at Microsoft or other reputable providers. Cloud computing is essential for defending against attacks, consistent server availability, and disaster recovery. The cost of a breach can be massive as it is not exclusively money paid to ransomware or on the services to recover data, but also lost productivity and loss of business due to file inaccessibility. Services like Azure protect your data from breaches through constant updates, monitoring, and data duplication between servers making it far easier to recover lost or stolen data.

Keeping operating systems up to date is crucial to avoid a breach. BitSight’s, “A Growing Risk Ignored: Critical Updates” states that computers running outdated versions of operating systems were 3x more likely to experience a publicly disclosed data breach. With cloud-based resources, updates happen automatically from your provider, so you never have to worry about manually checking.

A real-life example of why this is necessary would be a ransomware attack. Ransomware is on the rise with scammers looking to extort money, usually from larger businesses but also smaller ones. Ransomware corrupts your data, encrypting your files, and the hacker demands money in exchange for releasing your data. Keeping your company’s data on one private database puts you completely at the hacker’s will. On the other hand, when you back your data up using Azure and enable blob versioning, multiple copies of your files exist, and recovery is simple. Blob versioning means that every time a file is changed, the older version of the file is kept in case the changes were not deliberate. This way your business has access to older versions of your files that have not been corrupted by the ransomware, making recovery swift and saving potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Here is a screenshot from the Azure Security Centre to show the many functions available on the platform: