Are CEOs Ignoring Data Recovery?

Solution providers need to be on the front foot and encourage active backup recovery and restore testing as part of any cyber defense strategy.

  • July 16, 2021 | Author: Todd Hyten
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It’s rare these days if cybersecurity and data protection are not top of mind for business leaders. The key question many CEOs and CIOs and other C-suite executives ask is “how is our cybersecurity stance?” and “are we doing enough?” 

Maybe it’s because there’s so much emphasis on guarding the edge where intrusions starts (and primary storage) that some may take their eye off the ball in other areas. When you are focused on prevention, you may not be focusing on what happens when prevention fails. And when it comes to ransomware, prevention can fail a lot. 

 

Recent research by data protection provider Arcserve uncovered some surprising findings.

IT decision-makers reported that only 8 percent of their CEOs track metrics to ensure a complete data recovery plan. And 58 percent of CEOs only wanted to know that a data recovery plan was in place, without knowing the details. 

 

Given the severe business effects of recent ransomware attacks, it should be clear that data breaches and attacks are most definitely a business problem, not just an IT problem. Just ask Kaseya, or meat processor JBS or Colonial Gas. Attacks resulted in actual business shutdowns—adding the burden of lost revenue to the cost of attack mitigation and yes, ransom payments (JBS paid $11 million and Colonial Gas paid $4.4 million, according to Yahoo News). 

 

Solution providers need to be on the front foot and encourage active backup recovery and restore testing as part of any cyber defense strategy. It’s not enough that your customer has implemented a data backup and protection solution. They need to ensure that data restores are a key step in any business continuity plan. 

 

You can get the conversation started with key questions: 

* Is there a recovery playbook that outlines the people, process and tools to be used in different scenarios? 

* How often does the organization practices full data restores? 

* Are all recovery points covered—even those in remote or branch offices? 

* Is the data from all of your cloud-based apps backed up as well (like Microsoft 365)?

* Is the client using immutable storage?

* If failover to cloud-based or remote locations, has a full transition to these resources been tested? 

 

And last but not least, are all business decision makers aware of what the data recovery plan is in case of a severe data breach or attack? If everyone is informed of the importance of the data restoration process, it may help raise the profile of this crucial work to any client. 

 

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