The Rise And Rise Of Digital Resiliency

An IDC white paper examined the rise of digital resiliency as an important shift in thinking about today’s security challenges.

  • November 30, 2021 | Author: Todd Hyten
Learn More about this topic

Article Key

As 2021 draws to a close, it’s a good time to sum up to see how the security landscape has changed. An IDC white paper examined the rise of digital resiliency as an important shift in thinking about today’s security challenges. 

In its white paper “Increase Data Resilience and Improve Ransomware Defense by Integrating Data Protection and Security,” IDC sets up its recommendation with an overview that summarizes why digital resilience is now top-of-mind for everyone from CEOs to IT managers.

 

 

The primary reason is ransomware, mainly due to its alarming pervasiveness—and success. According to the report: “IDC research shows that more than 90% of those organizations surveyed acknowledge having been attacked by malware. And we find it likely that many of the remaining 10% are simply unaware of having been attacked or did not want to admit it."

 

This has led to the rise of digital resilience as a top concern. The goal of cyber security has traditionally been a defensive one – detecting and preventing beaches of IT security. But digital resilience is the ability for an organization to function despite a serious attack or to recover very quickly with minimal disruption. 

 

IDC says surveys it conducted between February and May of 2021 show the rise in prominence of digital resiliency and cyber recovery. In February, 61 percent of IT leaders questioned said digital resilience was a top spending priority over the next two years. By May that number had shot up to 78 percent. Only 9 percent of IT leaders said cyber resilience was a low priority.

 

More investment is not solely due to ransomware, the report notes. The volume of data is rapidly growing as is the complexity of the IT environment. IDC states that “the average growth rate of enterprise data is 43 percent per year over the next two years.” 

 

That’s a high growth rate, and it will happen as the application environment becomes more complex with increasing use of cloud and software-as-a-service options. The growth of cloud-based solutions, for either productivity or storage options, has been spurred by both data growth and the need to meet the needs of a more distributed work-from-home workforce. 

 

Adding to the need for a more resilient architecture, too, is dissatisfaction with the traditional silo-ed approach to data protection and data recovery and backup. Many companies felt compelled in the past to choose “best of breed” vendors and solutions to mix and match to suit their needs. This strategy has proved more problematic than practical as the IT environment becomes more complex – and more vulnerable. 

 

What all this leads up to is an increasing need for unified data protection. That’s something we’ll tackle in an upcoming blog: The Rise and Rise of Unified Data Protection. 

Related Content