A global survey commissioned by Arcserve reveals that 83% of IT decision-makers are now including data resilience in their business strategies but only 23% are reported to have a mature approach to it.
Data resilience refers to an organisation’s ability to recover from data breaches and other types of data loss; immediately enact business continuity plans; effectively recover lost assets and aggressively protect the organisation’s data moving forward.
Data resilience is the talk of IT these days, and for good reason says Byron Horn Botha, Arcserve Southern Africa business unit head. “Active threats to data security are not confined to criminal activity.
Data integrity can be impacted when physical data servers are subjected to natural disasters, such as the flooding we are currently seeing in the Western Cape, as well as the power outages resulting from these storms and of course, South Africa’s energy crisis with resulting load shedding. Human error can also damage critical data through simple file deletions or poor data management practices,” he says.
IT Governance recently posted that global data breaches and cyberattacks resulted in a breathtaking 719 366 482 records breached in February 2024.
So what can you to do about it?
“In essence, data resilience can be described as preparing for the worst – it is a proactive rather than reactive response. With so many threats, resilient data is the only way to ensure businesses can recover from an attack, breach, natural disaster, hardware failure, or other incident. While many IT pros may think of data resilience as data recovery, the difference is straightforward: data resilience is proactive, while data recovery is reactive,” says Horn-Botha.
He says a good data resilience strategy does a lot for businesses. “It enables companies to manage rapid data growth and handle various workloads, unify data recovery, and quickly get operations up and running after any event that compromises their data. It brings many benefits to organisations, including enhanced performance, reduced costs, reliable and efficient business operations, minimised risk, and strong protection in every part of your company.
“These are all very attractive propositions to any business. Arcserve Southern Africa is driving a campaign that aims to help businesses improve data resilience by providing the solutions and partner support necessary to achieve it.”