In 2024, companies will adopt more predictive risk management strategies to not only attempt to limit malicious threats and breaches but also to comply with growing cybersecurity regulations. Ransomware has become one of the top threats facing organizations today and is being deployed in ways that are unparalleled. This is according to Sales Manager for Commvault South Africa, Graham Brown.
“The reality is that ransomware is everywhere, including the very backups that are meant to be the last line of defense against an attack, and breaches are rapidly becoming the norm. In addition to the accelerated frequency of attacks, the average time to recovery is increasing – a successful attack can take a business down for weeks at a time, with devastating effects. Gone are the days when attacks can be effectively prevented – today, it truly is a matter of when, not if, you will be breached, and response and recovery are paramount. Recovery readiness and testing are critical in enabling you to become cyber resilient and weather an attack without critical disruption to business as usual.” notes Brown
Challenges to achieving cyber resilience
“While the ability to recover from an attack is vital, the status quo often falls short. Recovery testing is both complex and expensive, and building out a physical or virtual recovery environment to test critical application recovery is an unattainable goal for most businesses. In addition, there is a vast gap between cyber response plans and the actual capability to reliably test cyber recovery to ensure readiness.” he says
“The competence to rehearse a recovery is a vital component in ensuring confidence in being able to recover data safely and swiftly, which, in turn, is an essential element in achieving the level of cyber resilience required. However, due to the cost and complexity involved, many organizations rely on their Disaster Recovery (DR) plans, simulations, tabletop exercises, and checklists, which do not enable the people involved in a recovery to practice the event.” he adds
Solving the conundrum
Brown insists that in to ensure everything functions as intended, recovery must undergo frequent testing across various business cycles. Until now, achieving this has been nearly impossible. However, what if there were a method to reliably recover pristine applications every time?
“Partnerships between vendors are yielding solutions that facilitate secure and swift application recovery from on-demand “clean rooms” in the cloud, ensuring dependable cyber recovery where data resides.” he says
“This clean room recovery offers an end-to-end automated process applicable not only to readiness testing but also to forensic analysis and production failover. It incorporates core principles of data recovery best practices, such as immutable backups, air gapping, and zero-trust architecture, while adding an extra layer of choice and flexibility. This enables recovery of any application from any system into the cloud. Moreover, the entire process is automated, making recovery as simple as pushing a button.” he adds
Through innovative technology, businesses can harness cloud-ready recovery targets for unparalleled resilience, utilizing a malware-free cloud environment with unique capabilities to swiftly and cleanly identify and ensure recovery.” concludes Brown
