National Cybersecurity Awareness Month (NCSAM), held every October, highlights a key theme each year. For 2022, the theme is: “See Yourself in Cyber.” Cybersecurity is more than a set of principles or tools—people are a major component, helping keep businesses safe by complying with multi-factor authentication, using strong passwords, keeping devices updated with the latest software, not installing unapproved software on devices, and reporting phishing.

In today’s business environment, the risk of a ransomware attack is high and continues to grow. Threat actors are well financed, motivated, and very organized. While securing your environment and infrastructure is critically important, preparation to respond to an actual ransomware attack is essential. With an incalculable number of potential vulnerabilities and attack vectors, you have to be prepared to effectively respond to and recover from an attack.

The State of Ransomware in Government 2021 report finds that government agencies are facing a ransomware “national emergency.” Local governments in particular face higher rates of encryption during cyber attacks due to constrained budgets and organizational pressure to divert funds away from cybersecurity, leaving gaps in their data protection.

Ransomware and other malicious threats have become commonplace around the globe. But the reality is, whether it be encrypted records, stolen email credentials, or exfiltrated financial statements, these incidents generally involve a limited number of individuals or groups. Before your feathers are completely ruffled, understand that by no means am I minimizing the impact cybercriminals can have on a business. But have you considered attacks of greater scale? Perhaps those that affect the populus?

Chris Krebs, former Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Administration (CISA) and the new Chair of Rubrik’s CISO Advisory Board, joined us at FORWARD to discuss ransomware, cyber resilience, and all things data security with co-founder and CTO, Arvind (Nitro) Nithrakashyap. His vast experience working with executives, government officials, and IT experts across the country has given him a unique insight into cybersecurity, which he shared, only at FORWARD.

Coming in with very limited domain knowledge, it was a huge challenge for me to dive in and design product features for highly specialized use cases in the data security space. Chances are, there are a lot of you in UX and Product Designer roles who go through similar experiences when designing enterprise software in niche industries. Over the past several years I've discovered a few strategies that have helped ground me in my work.

I’m thrilled to share that today marks a defining moment in Rubrik’s mission to secure the world’s data with several major milestones including: I’m proud of the Rubrik team and their relentless focus on product innovation, but we couldn’t have done this without amazing customers and partners who believe in our mission and continue to trust us with their businesses and their data.

Today, I’m excited to announce that Rubrik has achieved the status of a certified Backup & Restore provider for Microsoft Teams. We’re thrilled to demonstrate proficiency and commitment to meet Microsoft customers’ evolving needs in today’s security-first, cloud-first world and a distinguishing mark within Microsoft’s partner ecosystem.