Today’s always-on, hyperconnected world requires CIOs to confront two equally important concepts: data protection and cyber resilience. As reliance on data to fuel analytics, engineering, marketing, and other key operations increases, the complexity surrounding IT infrastructure grows in tandem. Hybrid workforces, edge computing, cloud-native applications, and legacy systems add further complexity to the mix.
Meanwhile, the rise in sophisticated cyberattacks, compounded by escalating cyber insurance costs, pressure to drive down operational costs and the need for 24/7 uptime, calls for stronger defences, and smarter, faster recovery strategies.
The question is no longer whether companies should prioritise data protection or cyber resilience but rather how to integrate both, effectively and sustainably.
The Modern Challenge: More Data, More Points of Failure
For many organisations, IT systems span on-premises data centres, hyperscale cloud platforms, mobile endpoints, and edge devices. Each of these points presents its own set of risks and recovery complexities.
Add to this the proprietary nature of the data being handled and stored on these systems and the stakes grow higher. A single vulnerability can result in a major breach that jeopardises the organisation, impacts customer trust and raises flags in regard to regulatory compliance, resulting in hefty fines and other knock-on costs.
Disaster Recovery is Not Enough
Traditional disaster recovery (DR) approaches designed for catastrophic events and natural disasters are still necessary today, but companies must implement a more security-event-oriented approach on top of that.
Legacy approaches to disaster recovery are insufficient in an environment that is rife with cyberthreats as these approaches focus on infrastructure, neglecting application-level dependencies and validation processes. Further, threat actors have moved beyond interrupting services and now target data to poison, encrypt or exfiltrate it.
As such, cyber resilience needs more than a focus on recovery. It requires the ability to recover with data integrity intact and prevent the same vulnerabilities that caused the incident in the first place.
What Cyber Resilience Looks Like
Cyber resilience requires a proactive approach based on the assumption that breaches will occur. It also demands a shift in strategies paying particular attention to:
- Event-Triggered Recovery
Recovery should not wait for human interventions or decision-making. Modern environments must integrate with intrusion detection systems (IDS), SIEM tools, and behavioural analytics to identify anomalies and initiate recovery processes when anomalies in data are detected. This necessitates a more stringent recovery process to ensure data cleanliness; this is important if it affects customer or employee data.
- Runbooks Over Failover Plans
Failover plans, which are common in disaster recovery, focus on restarting Virtual Machines (VMs) sequentially but lack comprehensive validation. Application-centric recovery runbooks, however, provide a step-by-step approach to help teams manage and operate technology infrastructure, applications and services. This is key to validating whether each service, dataset and dependency works correctly in a staged and sequenced approach. This is essential as businesses typically rely on numerous critical applications, requiring a more detailed and validated recovery process.
- Isolated Clean Rooms for Recovery
Recovering in production environments can be risky. However, having isolated “clean room” environments enables organisations to restore systems and validate their integrity without the threat of malware, compromised code, or other vulnerabilities. This process ensures that systems are secure before they are reintroduced into the on-premises environment or other appropriate locations.
- Recovery Prioritisation by Business Impact
Not all data and applications across an organisation are equal. Systems that are crucial for customer engagement or revenue generation, such as e-commerce platforms or engineering CAD systems, for example, may require near-instant failover capabilities to ensure operations are uninterrupted, even in the event of unexpected failures. Less critical workloads, however, may withstand several hours of downtime. Thus, it is important to define recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) based on the specific needs of each system across the company.
Testing: The Vital Missing Link Between Planning and Execution
These strategies, however, are meaningless without regular testing. Yet many organisations consider it a checkbox compliance exercise, overlooking the importance of this final step in the process.
Regular testing provides the best defence against human error, assumptions, and silent system drift.
To maximise the benefit of a cyber resilience strategy, companies should conduct tests for frequently updated systems every month. Scenario-based tabletop exercises should take place quarterly and full failovers in clean room environments should occur annually to assess real-world preparedness.
Edge Devices and Endpoint Recovery: Don’t Ignore the Frontlines
The shift to hybrid work has extended the threat surface as mobile devices, remote workstations and IoT devices, for example, often hold sensitive or mission-critical data which is not monitored or secured due to their distributed or decentralised nature which makes it challenging, particularly when located in remote areas. Further, these devices may receive fewer software updates, leaving vulnerabilities open to exploitation. These factors make them an attractive target for threat actors.
Security teams cannot afford to overlook these points and must implement data security strategies that scale to the edge, tailoring Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) based on user roles and data sensitivity to ensure that critical data is prioritised for recovery, and thereby minimising the impact on operations and maintaining cyber resiliency.
Cyber Resilience: Preparing For Not “If” But “When”
Cyber resilience is now essential. With ransomware that can encrypt systems in minutes, the ability to recover quickly and effectively is a business imperative. Therefore, companies must develop an adaptive, layered strategy that evolves with emerging threats and aligns with their unique environment, infrastructure and risk tolerance.
To effectively prepare for the next threat, technology leaders must balance technical sophistication with operational discipline as the best defence is not solely a hardened perimeter, it’s also having a recovery plan that works. Today, companies cannot afford to choose between data protection and cyber resilience, they must master both.
Sean Tilley, Senior Sales Director EMEA at 11:11 Systems