Can cloud backup be hacked and is it immune to ransomware attacks?

Cloud backup is one of those terms businesses and individuals blithely use to describe a number of services that aren’t in fact cloud backup at all!

It’s easy to see where the confusion arises. Take Google’s G Suite, for example – or indeed Microsoft 365, Dropbox, Box, or any number of similar solutions. They’re in the cloud and they look after your data – therefore they’re cloud data backup, right?

cloud storage, not cloud backup.

So, in attempting to answer the question as to whether cloud backup can be hacked, or if it is immune to ransomware, we first have to establish what cloud backup actually is.

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Cloud backup: the good, the bad and the illegal

By its very nature, ‘backup’ means data must be retrospectively accessible for far longer than a mere few days.

Sixty days is the generally accepted bare minimum, but GDPR requirements and compliance regimes in highly regulated industries like finance can push this to several years or more.

This is where cloud backup, as a concept, really comes into its own. It stores huge volumes of backed-up data in a powerful data centre elsewhere (aka the cloud). If disaster befalls the office, it doesn’t take the backed-up data with it, b