John Anthony Smith, founder and chief security officer of Conversant Group, discusses innovative approaches to properly securing backups and accessing them to achieve more robust overall defenses. Conventional cybersecurity practices often begin by prioritizing security defenses in the same order as the attack “kill chain.” However, threat actors have an end goal: reaching your data and encrypting/destroying your backups. Information security must begin by working in reverse, assuming that a threat actor will penetrate the perimeter, and then work to ensure resiliency in backup defenses, a top priority security control.