Escalating cyber threats and attacks constantly put businesses under pressure, increasingly prompting organisations to shift their mindsets towards ensuring continuous operations and thus avoiding downtime and revenue loss.
By Modeen Malick, principal systems engineer at Commvault
When the inevitable cyberattack happens, organisations must be able to rapidly rebuild, reconstruct and recover to ensure business continuity. As such, the concept of being able to recover data autonomously after a cyberattack is transforming how businesses manage their cyber resilience.
Autonomous data recovery combines automated validation, live data replication and rapid recovery and is designed to automate disaster and cyber recovery processes. It relies on Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven automation, continuous replication and automated failover to ensure that data is clean, complete and always available, even if it resides at a secondary site.
AI-based threats have the potential to be more sophisticated, adaptive and damaging than traditional attacks. To counteract this evolving threat landscape, organisations must adopt a cyber resilience strategy that embraces innovative approaches, which is why AI-driven automation is a key component of the rapid restoration of data in autonomous recovery.
Better efficiency, fewer resources
AI allows tasks to be automated to derive better efficiency, essentially enabling businesses to be more efficient with fewer resources. It also enables organisations to use their data-driven insights to automatically understand what customers or employees need and then generate the right result at the right time.
This means that AI-driven automation also makes mass recovery simple, enabling companies to scale it up. So, whether an organisation needs 100 servers to be restored or 100 applications to be recovered, AI-driven automation provides this capability.
Another main advantage of autonomous recovery is that it reduces recovery time and therefore downtime. After all, time is money and with the increased importance of data in business operations, workloads are becoming more complex and more distributed, so the traditional ways of doing backup and recovery are no longer sufficient. For instance, traditional backup and recovery solutions can require additional fees or provide less coverage.
On the other hand, autonomous recovery typically provides everything a company would need, including previous requirements such as backup, archive replication and disaster recovery, and also now built-in ransomware protection for all workloads, irrespective of where they are on-premises, in the public cloud or a hybrid multi-cloud environment.
Comprehensive coverage
Autonomous recovery provides comprehensive coverage, including for file systems, applications, databases, virtual machines, containers, Software-as-a-Service (including Microsoft 365 and Salesforce) and endpoints. It also provides cost-optimised cloud data mobility with support for Azure, AWS and Google Cloud Platform, as well as the verifiable recovery of data, applications and replicas.
Additionally, autonomous recovery enables easy-to-use disaster recovery orchestration with automated compliance reporting, on-demand testing, and one-click recovery. It also provides flexible replication, from periodic replication to sub-minute Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) and near-zero Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs).
Organisations looking to avoid costly data loss scenarios and streamlined disaster recovery initiatives can benefit significantly from robust yet easy-to-use autonomous recovery solutions. With built-in disaster recovery orchestration, automated compliance reporting, flexible replication and cost-optimised cloud data mobility, autonomous recovery helps ensure business continuity and avoid costly downtime.
At the end of the day, data protection should be intelligent. Next-generation data protection harnesses the power of advanced automation and AI, so businesses can drive better data decisions while reducing cognitive load. Autonomous recovery allows businesses to automate workflows, classify data and its sensitivity, monitor user and file activities, and roll back to pre-infectious states with speed, precision and confidence.
Businesses need trusted recoverability and compliance wherever data lives, today and tomorrow. Autonomous recovery delivers trusted recoverability across the industry’s broadest set of data so that organisations can eliminate downtime and ensure business operations with unparalleled Service Level Agreement (SLA) compliance.