The Smart CIO Knows Cyber Recovery Strategies Must Be Nimble, High-powered, and Cost-effective

By Shahar Bar-Or, Chief Product Officer at Infinidat

In our new digital economy, the majority of businesses rely on their data to be available all the time. It is little surprise that, according to the World Economic Forum, cyber security failure and IT infrastructure breakdowns are now two of the top global risks facing business leaders today. It sits alongside the more existential threats of another global pandemic, environmental damage, and natural weather disasters. Currently many enterprises are challenged by how to effectively manage cyber-attacks, including suffering business data downtime. Maintaining customer loyalty and trust with their data is also critical to businesses.

Unsurprisingly, the continued growth of enterprise storage and real-time data demands, mirror the exponential rise in the amount of data currently generated. IDC predicts that the Global Datasphere will quadruple from 45 Zettabytes in 2019 to 175 Zettabytes by 2025. In the same IDC estimates that the cost of ransomware attacks on businesses will top $20 billion this year. Global damages related to cybercrime will reach $6 trillion, which are sobering figures for any CIO or CISO – enterprises would do well to consider these costs when budgeting for the next few years.

A Clear and Present Danger

Each element within a company’s ecosystem faces the real risk of a significant data breach; from employees and customers who work remotely, to its evolving cloud strategy and IoT devices. Clearly, an optimal cyber recovery solution needs to be at the core of every organization’s cyber defense strategy and integral to all business processes.

All organizations must prepare for the unexpected by ensuring their infrastructure can deliver the fastest possible recovery time to deliver uninterrupted access and availability to data. Cyber-attacks and ransomware target backup solutions and storage with an ease never before seen and backup is no longer viewed as the last line of defense! When cyber-attackers plan their assaults, they learn the weaknesses in all our fortifications, including any backup and data protection strategies.

It is imperative that enterprises defend their backup with immutable snapshots, which, when used consistently, protect data from the harmful effects of malware and ransomware, as well as having the capability to begin the recovery process near-instantaneously. As a result, the informed CIO can be confident that the business will recover from cyber terrorists, technical malfunctions, or frequent human error, without any compromise and with full data integrity.

It Pays to be Prepared

IT security teams need to heighten their response plans and awareness of increasingly sophisticated ransomware threats. Cyber protection and business continuity are primary considerations in defining the quality of information systems and the businesses they support. With the primary storage global footprint expanding exponentially, cyber protection and recovery solutions are struggling to keep up economically and technically. The capability of quickly restoring data systems and applications from trusted sources is now integral to a company’s successful cyber defense strategy. However, it’s simply not enough to run daily backups on whatever storage is lying around in the data center.

To address these challenges, companies need to ask themselves; how technologically vulnerable are the systems to malfeasance and can the enterprise fight off any ransomware attacks with efficient data recovery capabilities? The smart CIO will demand petabyte-scale data protection, with lightning-fast recovery for their mission critical operations, uninterrupted data access, and application availability.

Malicious ransomware has destroyed backups, stolen authorizations, leaked stolen information, and caused businesses of all sizes to shut down operations overnight. Cybersecurity firm, Cybersecurity Ventures, predicts that ransomware is expected to attack a business every 11 seconds by the end of 2021. Effective cyber recovery solutions need availability, and a fully scaled data restoration is required for business continuation. Many solutions are lacking in performance and speed, unable at the crucial moment to make a full restoration when needed. To make matters worse, many systems are overwhelmingly expensive to buy, operate, and maintain.

Consolidate, Protect and Fight Back

As we have discussed, protecting your entire backup environment is an essential part of any organization’s cyber defense strategy. In an ideal future there should be fewer and fewer attacks that breach enterprise defenses, as the financial rewards of cybercrime reduce, and the punishments for such terrorists become increasingly more punitive on the global stage.  

Threats to the world’s data and critical infrastructure are grave but the future is brightening as the next generation of data protection solutions provide best-in-class safeguards for the entire backup environment with at scale recovery. The most robust cyber recovery strategies will ensure that copies of data cannot be deleted, encrypted, or changed.  These will be key features alongside air gap protection, and flexible, granular, and near-instantaneous recovery back to any point in the history of the data. A sensible, focused strategy and long-term investment in IT infrastructure will mean that any business or government body under attack has the tools to protect its core value, reputation, and customer data.

Learn how to bolster your defenses at Infinidat.com

About Shahar Bar-Or

Shahar Bar-Or is the Chief Product Officer and General Manager of Israeli operations at Infinidat. Previously, he was VP of Embedded Engineering and Israel Site Leader at Western Digital, and prior to that, he was at SanDisk. He has over two decades of leadership experience in the technology industry.