How Data Resilience Takes You Beyond Backup and Recovery

By Florian Malecki, Executive Vice President Marketing, Arcserve

Data resilience is typically defined as an organization’s ability to ensure business continuity in the face of any disaster or disruption. While there’s more to the story regarding achieving data resilience, the concept itself is simple.

As we wrote in a recent post, a global survey of IT decision-makers commissioned by Arcserve found that 83 percent now include data resilience in their business strategies. The bad news is that only 23 percent have a mature approach to data resilience.

That won’t cut it in today’s threat-filled world, especially as organizations migrate to hybrid IT environments. That’s why you need a well-thought-out and battle-tested data recovery plan that’s ready to roll if a catastrophic failure or other disaster strikes. Your business runs on data, and if that data is ever unavailable, it can bring your company to an expensive standstill. That’s where data resilience enters the picture, ensuring your business can quickly recover from any data-threatening event and continue to operate.

Here are three key steps you can take to develop a robust data resilience strategy:

Create a Plan; Test It Often

The success of your data resilience strategy depends on consistent testing of your plan and ongoing optimization of its components. You need to be proactive because it’s too late once disaster strikes. Planning and testing are your keys to success and can make the difference between a thriving business and no business.

Plenty of research confirms that ransomware attacks and other data loss events lead to lost customers. A study by Okta found that 88 percent of respondents would be unlikely to purchase from a company they didn’t trust, and 45 percent said they have serious reservations about buying goods and services online from a company if they have concerns about data breaches. Recovering from those repercussions is a lot harder than ensuring data resilience.

Ensure Your Executive Team is Included

It takes a collaborative effort between IT teams and company executives to ensure data resilience. Unfortunately, data resilience has yet to become a priority in many C-suites. For global businesses, that has to change, especially with the introduction of new cybersecurity requirements like the NIS 2 Directive in the EU.

In many organizations, data resilience initiatives can face obstacles to adoption if no executive champion supports their objectives. A successful data resilience initiative starts at the top, with buy-in from executives and even the board of directors. When that happens, everyone recognizes the importance of the effort and will more likely play their part in its success so that if—or when—disaster does strike, your business is more likely to recover.

Employ a Multilayered Approach

The key to achieving data resilience is a multilayered strategy where you deploy an infrastructure designed to meet your specific requirements. One vital layer is ensuring frequent data backups following the 3-2-1-1 backup strategy.

Snapshots of your data should be taken every 90 seconds to minimize any data loss and ensure instant recovery and placed in immutable storage. Immutability ensures the snapshots can’t be modified or deleted by hackers or encrypted by ransomware. That’s how the City of Palermo, Italy, recovered after a recent cyberattack.

Automation and orchestration are two essential components of a multilayered approach because they help streamline data recovery. Your chosen solution should include processes and automated workflows that ensure consistency and reduce complexity, especially when disaster strikes. That will help you get your data back fast, minimizing damage.

Make Data Resilience a Priority

Data resilience can save your business. At the very least, knowing your data is protected can help you sleep better at night. But a sound data resilience strategy can take you even further, helping you manage your ever-growing mountains of data, handle a variety of workloads, unify data recovery, and get you back in business fast if disaster strikes.

Learn how you can enhance your data resilience by choosing an expert Arcserve technology partner. And find out more about Arcserve products by checking out our free demos on demand.