Beyond backup: The compelling case for data resilience

Thinking that simply backing up your data will save the day is a shortsighted strategy with little or no place in today’s world. Because when it happens – that inevitable cyberattack or natural disaster – you’ll find that just having a copy of your data is far from enough.

And if you have a hybrid cloud environment, with data sprawled across myriad locations and platforms, then you assuredly need more than just backups to save your bacon.

If you haven’t yet developed a data resilience strategy, there’s no time to waste. The latest Notifiable Data Breaches Report from the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner revealed a rapid rise nationwide in notifiable data breaches in the first six months of 2024.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, we once again say: It’s no longer a matter of if (you’re attacked), but when.

Backup vs. data resiliency

Just so there’s no confusion:

Should you be creating backups? Obviously – that’s a yes. Backing up your data is essential for data recovery – but it’s a reactive approach, a pink band-aid applied after the accident in the hope that it will hasten recovery. Yes, backups restore your lost data. But they won’t prevent you from losing it in the first place, and the post-disaster backup process can lead to significant downtime, as your systems may need to be taken offline to restore data.

By comparison, data resilience is a proactive approach. It focuses on preventing data loss and ensuring continuous availability. So, when disaster strikes (as it will), your business can keep running, downtime is minimised, and data integrity is maintained.

In short, if you’re not thinking about data resilience, you’re not thinking far enough ahead.

What does disaster look like?

What happens to your business when you experience a natural disaster or cyber-attack? Why can this sort of event stop your people and operations in their tracks?

Here’s what can happen:

1. Operational systems out of commission: Your core business applications and systems may become inaccessible, halting production, sales, or service delivery. Everything you rely on to run a business is in ‘off’ mode.  
2. Employee productivity plummets: Your staff may be unable to perform their tasks effectively, leading to decreased productivity, frustration, fear, and low morale.
3. No access to data: Being unable to access essential data, including customer information, financial records, and operational data, can severely impact your decision-making and operations.
4. You can’t communicate: Your communication tools (think email, messaging platforms, etc.) can be compromised. Your team members can’t talk to each other, let alone to your customers and suppliers.
5. Disrupted financial transactions: Your payment processing systems may be disrupted, preventing sales and impacting your cash flow.
6. Zero customer service: If your customer support systems go down, it’s a red flag for your customer relationships. Few customers are impressed with delayed responses to their queries and requests for help and are fast to change loyalties.
7. You can quickly get a bad rep. Trust can be rapidly eroded if customers learn of the breach, leading to potential loss of business and reputation damage.
8. Failed regulatory compliance: Your compliance with data protection laws may be at risk, resulting in legal consequences and significant fines.
9. Disrupted supply chains: If your suppliers or partners are affected, it may disrupt your supply chain, impacting inventory and delivery.
10. The cost of recovery: Then, there’s the financial burden of remediation efforts, including IT forensics, system repairs, and potential legal fees. All of which can place a heavy strain on your people and your bank balance.

Given the potential impact on your business, relying on backups to dig you out of the deep hole of disaster is highly optimistic.

Data resilience – a holistic approach

Data resilience is about ensuring business continuity. It’s accepting that the impact of an attack can be wide and varied and that just restoring data via back-ups isn’t going to be enough to get you back in business.

Don’t get us wrong – backups are essential (and play an important role in a data resilience approach) – but they’re only part of the picture. Big-picture data resilience also encompasses recovery, redundancy, disaster recovery (DR) planning and cybersecurity. And it requires you to implement measures that ensure data availability, integrity, and security even in the face of unexpected events to minimise data loss and maintain business continuity.

Adopting a data resilience strategy can help your business pre-, during-, and post-incident in three ways.  

1. It enables you to better withstand a cyber-attack.
2. If you’re already impacted, it helps you to access your most important data and applications despite network disruptions or failures.
3. It supports your rapid recovery and return to BAU.

How about data resiliency in a hybrid or multi-cloud environment?

Security and recovery are not assured simply because you’re in the cloud – whether public or private. And scarily, backup repositories are targeted in 96% of attacks, with bad actors ‘successfully’ affecting those repositories in 76% of cases.

If you count yourselves amongst the 89% of organisations with a multi-cloud strategy, you’re probably well aware of the challenges of backing up in the cloud. Legacy systems don’t deliver; relying on native backup tooling for each environment both fragments ease of management and crates inefficiencies and higher costs; and some first-party vendor solutions restrict flexibility and compromise performance, which drives up costs.

However, as said earlier, just investing in backup (no matter how good) on its own is a shortsighted strategy. Achieving data resilience requires your backup and cybersecurity teams to be aligned. To quote Veeam’s 2024 Ransomware Trends Report, “Recovery from a ransomware attack is a team sport.”

Yet most organisations struggle with this alignment, with 63% saying they need a complete overhaul or significant improvement to be fully aligned.

When asked why their teams weren’t better aligned, the most common answer (by respondents to Veeam’s report) was “a lack of integration between backup tools and cybersecurity tools.”

Summary

It’s been said that backup is easy, but recovery is hard – especially if you’re relying on your saved data to do more than it was ever intended. And with the rate at which we generate data and the increasing complexity of our technology environments, ‘hard’ isn’t a word that any of us want to hear.

A data resilience strategy that utilises integrated backup and cybersecurity tools is essential to survive D-day.

Whether it’s your first, tenth, or hundredth attack, you need to be able to face every event with the confidence that you will come out the other side with your data and business intact. Resilient to the end.