3 Key Findings That May Impact Your Resiliency Strategy

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Natural disasters, cyber-attacks, scheduled data centre maintenance: What do these have in common? They all cause disruption.

Disruption occurs for a variety of reasons, and whether planned or unplanned, Indian businesses need a strategy to manage disruption. Traditional Disaster Recovery (DR) approaches relied on an all-or-nothing attitude when a disruption occurred, with the limited ability to only recover the full site, not specific applications or application bundlers. With the increasing number of applications managed by IT and the increasing reliance on those applications by business users, it’s time to reconsider legacy DR strategies.

The Dell Technologies Global Data Protection Index is a survey of 1000 IT decision makers globally on the maturity of their data protection strategies and how they value data and assess the relative preparedness of their businesses.

This year’s results highlight that organisations have experienced higher levels of disruptions in the past year, with over 86 percent of respondents’ organisations experiencing at least one disruption in the last 12 months. This points toward a staggering trend of increasing data loss, downtime, and recovery costs.

Breaking down the overall disruptions within this year’s report, there were a few noteworthy take aways:

1. With outages being so widespread and costly, businesses have started looking toward the next generation of methods to maximise availability for their users. 36 percent of respondents had experienced unplanned system downtime in the last year. This combined with other disruptions resulted in the estimated cost of data loss in the last 12 months reaching an average of $1,057,895. To combat these costly disruptions, a recent concept has emerged as a favourite of early adopters—application mobility. This methodology minimises both planned and unplanned downtime by ensuring applications can quickly move between data centres, introducing true mobility. This could be executed to mitigate longer planned downtime or to recover from an isolated incident within the production data centre, thus avoiding a longer outage or the need to failover to DR. One of the most critical steps in enabling application mobility is deeply analysing applications and their business requirements to better understand their use. Then, using this information, assigning an appropriate level of availability to each application or bundle.

2. The lack of confidence that data protection measures can mitigate the effects of cyberattacks is alarming. 67 percent of respondents were concerned that their organisation’s existing data protection measures may not be sufficient to cope with malware and ransomware threats. This is further echoed in their organisation’s ability to recover business-critical data in the event of cyberattack. Compounding this, there is a misguided overconfidence surrounding the consequences of a ransomware attack. 64 percent of respondents felt that their job and the employees within their organisation would not be affected by a ransomware attack; another factor that could expose organisations to further risk. There is a need to account for the impending risk of cyberattacks that are becoming more sophisticated by each passing day. Cybersecurity strategy cannot be an afterthought and a reactive stance to attacks is only going to lead to incremental losses for the businesses.

3. Having a cyber recovery strategy in place to reduce downtime and recover critical data in the event of a cyber-attack is essential. The drastically increasing threat landscape due to more and more applications driving business processes, increased reliance on applications, and more connected devices has forced organisations to develop and thoroughly test their strategies. In the last few years, ransomware has been one of the most destructive and newsworthy variants of cyber-attacks, with attackers locking files and demanding ransom in return. Respondents to this year’s report noted this trend, indicating that 42 percent had experienced an outage due to a ransomware attack. These attacks can be difficult to recover from and require specialised planning and technology to keep critical data isolated and ready for recovery.

These data points indicate a strong trend of both an increasing number of disruptions and causes of these disruptions. It is clearer than ever before that a holistic, modern approach to mitigating disruption must take an application-centric view to minimise downtime, based on the criticality of each application to business stakeholders.