In 2024, companies will adopt more predictive risk management strategies to not only attempt to limit malicious threats and breaches, but also comply with growing cybersecurity regulations. Ransomware has become one of the top threats facing organisations today and is being deployed in ways that are unparalleled.

The reality is that ransomware is everywhere, including the very backups that are meant to be the last line of defence 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.

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 actual capability to reliably test cyber recovery to ensure readiness.

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, because of the cost and complexity involved in this, many organisations 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.

Solving the conundrum

To make sure everything is working the way it should, recovery needs to be tested frequently and during various cycles of the business. However, this has, until now, proved almost impossible to achieve. But what if there was a way to ensure that you could recover clean, pristine applications, reliably, every time? Partnerships between vendors are delivering solutions that enable secure and quick recovery of applications where the data resides in on demand ‘clean rooms’ in the cloud, to ensure reliable cyber recovery.

This type of clean room recovery delivers an end-to-end automation process that can be applied seamlessly not only to readiness testing but also forensic analysis and production failover. It features the foundations of best practice data recovery, including immutable backups, air gapping and zero trust architecture, but brings in an extra layer of choice and flexibility, enabling you to recover any application anywhere, from any system, into the cloud. In addition, the entire process is automated, and recovery can be as easy as pushing a button. Using innovative new technology, businesses can leverage the power of cloud-ready recovery targets for unparalleled resilience using a malware free cloud environment with unique capabilities to identify and ensure a rapid and clean recovery.

To hear more about this topic, Commvault South Africa will be hosting their Shift, a global cyber resilience event taking place on Friday the 10 May 2024 in Johannesburg. This event promises discussions that will revolutionise perspectives on data security, data protection, and cyber resilience, especially in the age of artificial intelligence and ransomware. To register, click here.