Keys to fortifying data resilience (Part 2)

What are the best practices for data backup and recovery to ensure business continuity?

Since data is the lifeblood of businesses, a robust backup strategy is crucial to safeguard against data loss and ensure business continuity. IT leaders share the common backup challenges organisations in Asia Pacific face today and best practices for data backup and recovery.

Michel Borst, area vice president for Asia, Commvault:

In today’s hybrid cloud era, traditional data protection techniques continue to fall short as businesses try to recover from increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks. Today, cybercriminals no longer just infiltrate and corrupt production data and systems, but also insert malware into backups. So, when organisations try to recover from the attack using an infected backup copy, they inadvertently end up restoring the virus – this becomes a vicious cycle making it almost impossible for them to recover successfully and leaving them no choice but to pay the ransom.

But the fact is that backups are the cornerstone of a swift recovery after the breach. So, now I see a lot of chief information officers across Asia asking how their organisations can ensure they have an uninfected backup which can help them quickly recover and maintain performance.

Clean backup and recovery come to the rescue in such scenarios. Technologies such as anomaly detection and early warning systems, help thwart attacks at an early stage, while air-gapping and immutable design with zero trust strategy ensures you have an isolated backup copy, free from any malware.

In a recent Commvault survey, 98% of respondents indicated that data recoverability influences their resilience against ransomware attacks. After a cyberattack, having a clean backup is critical, but so is having a clean location (a “cleanroom”) to recover into. As such, we’re seeing the emergence of technologies, such as “Cleanroom Recovery”, utilising the power of the cloud and artificial intelligence (AI), to offer clean and easy restores in a new, uncontaminated, on-demand cloud environment. This not only enables organisations to become cyber resilient in a way that doesn’t carry the complexity and cost but also helps them eliminate untenable requirements of readiness and recovery in complex hybrid environments.

Matthew Hardman, chief technology officer for Apac, Hitachi Vantara:

In conversations with many customers across the region, there is no doubt that an organisation’s data is its most critical resource. Data provides an opportunity to understand an organisation’s operations, and serves as the fuel to power emerging technologies like AI. Data today is being generated and captured in more diverse locations than ever before, and in a greater variety of types.

Apac faces common backup and recovery challenges due to data growth, complexity in the IT landscape, compliance with data protection regulations, a growing threat of ransomware and cyber threats, and the need for backup solutions that can scale efficiently without compromising performance. Our Modern Data Infrastructure Dynamics report in 2023 has also projected a doubling of data storage needs by 2025. In Asia, 60% of companies feel overwhelmed by the data deluge, with 73% concerned about infrastructure scalability.

A data backup must be completed successfully without issues, resulting in data that is readily available with fast access when an organisation needs it. To achieve this scenario, you need a modern backup and recovery solution that is SAFER: Scalable, Affordable, Fast, Easy, and Reliable. Another consideration is how seamless the integration and installation process is, in line with the SAFER principle.

Enterprises must consider enhancing their backup strategy with cloud object storage solutions. As backups are a target for bad actors, this modern approach provides enhanced protection against ransomware attacks, while at the same time offering unlimited scale addressing data growth.

Sumir Bhatia, President for Asia Pacific of Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG), Lenovo:

In today's digital landscape, where data volumes are exploding, a robust backup strategy is essential for companies. Apac organisations, in particular, face challenges like extended backup times and soaring storage expenses.

World Backup Day serves as a timely reminder for organisations to re-assess their approach to data protection. Cloud-based backup solutions emerge as an enabler offering scalability and flexibility crucial for navigating the growing complexities and business demands. Moreover, the infusion of AI and machine learning augments data backup processes. It optimises deduplication and predictive analytics to mitigate storage overheads.

At Lenovo, we recognise these challenges and offer TruScale Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS). With our innovative technology, businesses can transcend the confines of traditional backup models, embracing a future where data resilience is synonymous with operational excellence.

Our solution doesn't just address the challenges; it transforms them into opportunities for growth and efficiency. Lenovo's TruScale BaaS simplifies backup operations and also fortifies data resilience, offering secure backups that ensure swift restoration post-cyberattacks. Additionally, with cost-efficient on-premises primary backup storage and flexible pay-as-you-go scalability, businesses across Apac can safeguard critical information effectively while optimizing resource allocation.

In essence, organisations need to navigate the complexities of digitalisation with confidence, ensuring that they not only survive but thrive in the digital era. With comprehensive and reliable solutions, businesses can safeguard their data, enhance resilience, and confidently steer through the evolving landscape of data protection and management.

You Qinghong, solutions engineering lead for Greater China, Asean and South Korea, NetApp:

As cyber threats evolve and ransomware attacks escalate in sophistication across Apac, safeguarding critical data and ensuring swift recovery are paramount for business continuity. Organisations can elevate their defences with data management solutions featuring integrated AI or machine learning-powered security models. These solutions enhance detection for a wide variety of ransomware attacks and achieve near real-time detection with more than 99% precision and recall.

To fortify cyber resilience further, organisations should deploy intelligent solutions capable of orchestrating a zero-trust architecture at the workload level. A policy-driven, trust nobody and “log everything” architecture enables the protection of critical workload data, minimising costly disruptions. Lastly, the solution must provide a last line of defence — including temper-proof copies of active datasets and “write once read many (WORM)”-like capabilities for long-term data retention — to provide recover points when all other measures fail to defend against the attack.

As such, it is critical for Apac organisations to start embracing a multi-layer strategy, detect-protect-recovery, taking a platform approach to build an intelligent data infrastructure. By doing so, they will be able to safeguard their valuable data where it resides, minimise disruptions, and ensure resilience in the face of evolving cyber threats.

Niel Pandya, Apac and Japan CTO at OpenText:

Many aspects influence backup and recovery strategies, including understanding data, IT visibility, and awareness of business costs during downtime. Recently, while assisting an Apac client, we encountered challenges with their backup tool due to incomplete system scoping and inefficient usage. Manual checks on 200 systems underscored the need for prioritisation and automation. It's crucial to prioritise critical systems for backup and recovery, aligning with the business's recovery time objectives.

Notably, a major bank in Singapore faced penalties due to system outages, underscoring the significance of system availability. Various threats, such as ransomware attacks and natural disasters, highlight the need for preparedness in data recovery. Understanding data sensitivity aids in implementing appropriate backup measures, including data discovery to reduce the data footprint, comply with regulations, and expedite backups and restores.

Andy Ng, vice president and managing director for Asia South and Pacific Region, Veritas Technologies:

Ransomware remains the top challenge faced by Apac organisations today. Downtime and outages from natural disasters and human error are still key concerns, but malware can compromise everything across the IT infrastructure. According to Veritas research, 67% of Apac organisations had been hit by at least one ransomware attack in the past two years, in which hackers were able to infiltrate their systems.

Here are three key considerations for effective data backup:

• Start the backup process with comprehensive data classification and implement deduplication.
   IT departments can’t afford to save their data indiscriminately – identification, categorisation and retention policies will help ensure critical and sensitive data is retained appropriately. Also, organisations can reduce their attack surfaces by minimising their data footprint through methodologies like deduplication.

• Uniting data protection with data security and data governance improves cyber resilience.
  Malware attacks affect the entirety of IT. Multiple teams typically manage the response using disparate tools and these interaction points can become potential vulnerabilities. An integrated ecosystem of data security, data protection and data governance is the only way to achieve gap-free cyber resilience.

• Harnessing the power of autonomous data management.
  The proliferation of applications and data today is unprecedented. Real-time manual protection is no longer possible. Reducing operational complexity through data management that responsibly harnesses AI and hyper-automation to continually self-provision and self-optimise is necessary to keep up with these challenges.

See Also:

• Click here to stay updated with the Latest Business & Investment News in Singapore

• Keys to fortifying data resilience (Part 1)

• Data is key to making Southeast Asia’s digital boom inclusive

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