Ransomware Doesn’t Have to Hit Like a Hurricane

Myota is about savings. The people who built the core tech were thinking about saving you from attacks. Myota also gets you true hard cost savings. But Myota also saves you from the types of losses you just can’t recover. The damage from attacks. So many people we talk to don’t have stuff backed up – even their critical data. And here's the cruel joke: the ones who do aren't as safe as they think, because 96% of ransomware attacks go straight for the backups. The safety net is the first thing the storm comes for. I saw a great video about New York City’s East Side Coastal Resiliency (ESCR) project. ESCR combines flooding protection from storm surge (and more) with things like parks and other usable, beneficial assets for NYC citizens. I couldn’t help making a connection.

The first and most obvious connection is that we’re talking about planning for the inevitable. If you’re 100% confident that no threat like ransomware will ever affect you, then you need to tell me why and we should go start a company immediately! All kidding aside, everyone knows that with around 600 million attacks daily (according to our friends at Microsoft) it’s all a matter of time before you get hit with the spray. Anyone lucky enough to have a sea view knows the same thing about how that water will rise problematically one day driven by a storm. You need a plan. ESCR is how New York is planning for the water. You need a plan to protect your data, too.

NYC’s ESCR is also breaking with conventional thinking around disaster planning. What it’s building isn’t just a big, honking wall. It will work like one, but all that time it’s not spending blocking water it will actually give the people who live with it beneficial, life-enhancing features. That’s not typical for disaster planning, and it comes from changing the very architecture of how the solution is delivered. Myota is exactly the same way. Is it data protection? Yes. But before some theoretical (but likely inevitable) attack shows up, it’s giving users fewer places to look for stuff, CIOs & CFOs less budget to spend on backup tech, and CISOs assurance that everything is secure and resilient against even mistakes (you all have been on that “Johnny deleted the critical data” phone call – right?).

Here's the thing about ransomware and hurricanes: both cost way more than anyone budgets for. IBM says the average ransomware or extortion hit runs about $5 million per incident — and almost no company has that kind of money just sitting around waiting. Hurricane Sandy? It cost New York City around $19 billion, and the city was already more than a billion in the hole before the storm even showed up. Now, fair warning: that $5 million is what a typical single attack costs one organization, while the $19 billion is the total damage from one massive storm across a whole city — so they're not apples-to-apples, and I wouldn't pretend they are. But the shape of the problem is identical. It's a totally predictable disaster that everyone treats as a surprise and then scrambles to pay for after the fact.

The coolest part of this comparison is actually where it breaks: cost. ESCR has to add parks to make the spend worth it. The win is protection you need to pay for anyway, now doubling as something people actually use. Myota does one better. It doesn't need the park, because it doesn't need the wall. Remember that buried floodwall doing two jobs at once? Myota's trick is that there's no separate structure to bury. The resilience is the storage. That's where the hard savings come from. You're not buying a slicker version of the same old dedicated backup tech, you're moving to a more advanced kind of storage that eliminates the need for that stuff completely. Fewer moving parts, less to manage. The savings aren't a bonus bolted onto the protection. They're the same thing.

Is this a stretch? Maybe. Is it weird that I’m watching construction videos to relax and spending this much time relating it to bleeding edge encrypted cyberstorage tech? Almost certainly. But Myota’s tech sits in such an odd place in today’s stack that I’m always seeking better ways to make it clear how critical it can be. No one wants to live through a hurricane. No one wants to be on that big bridge call about the breach that just whacked all our critical data. (Am I dating myself saying “bridge call” versus zoom or teams meeting? Yup.) If disasters are going to happen, then we need to make plans to make it through them. If your disaster plan can also increase efficiency and save hard costs right now, then why would you want to make a version that didn’t? If you can’t think of a reason why, then I’ve done my job here. You know why Myota has something pretty cool.