Introduction

Personally I have been very successful at providing good backup designs for Hyper-V in both small to larger environments using budgets that range in between “make due” to “well-funded”.  How does one achieve this? Two factors. The first factor is knowing the strengths and limitations of the various Hyper-V versions when you design the backup solution. Bar the ever better scalability, performance and capabilities with each new version of Hyper-V, the improvements in back up from 2012 to 2012 R2 for example were a prime motivator to upgrade. The second factor of success is due to the fact that I demand a mandate and control over the infrastructure stack to do so. In many case you are not that lucky and can’t change much in already existing environments. Sometimes not even in new environments when the gear, solutions have already been chosen, purchased and the design is deployed before you get involved.

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After spyware and malware IT administrators do have to face another threat – A Ransomware. You have to pay to recover your data that has been encrypted by malware. Clever move from the Pirate’s perspective. Indeed. Pirates are hoping that they can make some dirty money out of it. And sometimes they’re successful. You might be asking what can you do, as a system administrator, to protect yourself against ransomware?

Hackers will always find a way to your data and Anti-malware solutions will always try a way to block them. But you as an admin, must be prepared for an eventual data loss. Prepared how? We’ll try to find some strategies and tools which might be good to know. The tools that are built-in Windows Server 2016 that will be out later this year. Currently in TP5, but there won’t be any major updates on features further down the development cycle so the RTM of Windows Server 2016 shall have all what you can see in the TP5 which is available for download since about a week. We try to do a recap on which tools can be helpful to fight ransomware today.

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