After reading this article, I had a few dissenting thoughts, maybe someone will provide their perspective?
The article suggests not running critical workloads virtually based on a failure scenario of the hosting environment (such as ransomware on hypervisor).
That does allow using the ‘all your eggs in one basket’ phrase, so I agree that running at least one instance of a service physically could be justified, but threat actors will be trying to time execution of attacks against both if possible. Adding complexity works both ways here.
I don’t really agree with the comments about not patching however. The premise that the physical workload or instance would be patched or updated more than the virtual one seems unrelated. A hesitance to patch systems is more about up time vs downtime vs breaking vs risk in my opinion.
Is your organization running critical workloads virtual like anything else, combination physical and virtual, or combination of all previous plus cloud solutions (off prem)?
How you keep the air gapped system in sync?
We don’t. It’s a separate, simplified system that only lets the core team members access the layout-, editing- and typesetting-software that is locally installed on the bare metal servers.
In emergency mode, they get written articles and images from the reporters via otherwise unused, remotely hosted email addresses, and as a second backup, Signal.
They build the pages from that, send them to the printers, and the paper is printed old-school using photographic plates.
That’s a very high degree of BCDR planning, and quite costly I assume.
It’s less than the cost of our cybersecurity insurance, which will probably drop us on a technicality when the day comes.
And it’s not entirely an economic decision. The paper is family-owned in the 3rd generation, historically relevant as one of the oldest papers in the country, and absolutely no one wants to be the one in charge when it doesn’t print for the first time ever.