The Achilles heel is when backups and workloads are under the control of the same identity and access management (IAM) solution. In other words: When attackers compromise the IAM solution, they can delete servers and traditional backups (Figure 1, left). The attackers prepare some scripts and run them against your cloud infrastructure – a couple of minutes later, your applications crash or are deleted and gone. It does not help when the backup solution implements its own IAM solution. Attackers simply delete all resources of the backup solution in the cloud portal without logging in to the backup solution.
