True Data Resilience in an Era of Sophisticated Cyber Threats Comes Down to Strategy

Even the most casual layperson would know that the traditional approach to data protection – a simple backup and storage process – is insufficient. Even if they avoid the headlines, there is an awareness that cybercriminals are becoming more sophisticated, and a simple backup isn’t going to be a sufficient way to recover from an attack.

This leaves organisations facing pressures to revisit what were once considered comprehensive data protection environments. We call the shift a move from “backup” to “data resilience,” and that term is not a semantic one. Rather, it represents a fundamental change in how businesses must think about protecting their most critical asset.

Of course, the organisations that struggle with this the most are the SMEs, who had done the right thing and implemented backup solutions years ago but, as always with SMEs, simply don’t have the resources to continue to refresh their IT environments every time new technology reaches the horizon. Legacy resilience technology is a real problem for organisations that are increasingly favoured as “low-hanging fruit” for criminals. Close to one in two attacks target small businesses, and very often those attacks are successful, with the SME then finding that they’re not able to restore their environment due to the inadequate nature of the backups. This is why one in five SMEs is at risk of closing directly as a result of a cyber attack. This is not a time to panic, but it is important to take action.

Beyond Basic Backup

Modern data resilience requires sophisticated protection mechanisms that many organisations don’t realise are available or affordable. Key capabilities include:

• Immutability and Time Locking: Advanced functionality that can time lock data and create an additional layer of availability and resilience. These features often don’t require extra software costs but provide crucial protection against ransomware attacks that target backup systems.

• Intelligent Compression and Deduplication: Modern deduplication models can dramatically compress storage footprints, enabling organisations to increase retention from one week to one month without proportional increases in storage costs.

• Cyber Recovery Capabilities: In the event of a ransomware attack, having mechanisms that ensure recovered data is actually valuable becomes critical. This has transformed data protection from a backup administrator’s responsibility into a comprehensive cyber resilience strategy.

These technologies – which Perfekt can provide to SME customers in collaboration with HPE technology, recognise that modern threats require more than just copying data; they require comprehensive strategies that ensure data integrity, availability, and recoverability under attack conditions. The goal is to guarantee that recovered data actually provides value to customers and supports business operations.

Infrastructure Requirements for True Resilience

Effective data resilience requires robust infrastructure capable of supporting advanced protection features. HPE’s approach recognises that massive amounts of hardware need to be deployed to fuel comprehensive data protection strategies, combined with advanced tooling from Veeam featuring immutability, time locking, and unlocking capabilities.

The infrastructure must support not just storage capacity, but the computational requirements for real-time deduplication, encryption, and the rapid recovery capabilities essential for business continuity.

This all has a cost attached to it, and the market reality is that dedicated appliances can be costly, which can be prohibitive for smaller organisations. However, this is where leveraging Perfekt and its strategic partnerships between infrastructure providers and data protection specialists become valuable. By combining HPE’s hardware platforms with Veeam’s advanced software capabilities, organisations can access enterprise-grade protection capabilities at SME-appropriate price points.

Organisations serious about data resilience should consider a workshop-based approach to assess their current capabilities and develop comprehensive protection strategies. These engagements help identify gaps in current protection, evaluate new capabilities, and develop implementation roadmaps that balance security requirements with budget realities.

The goal is to move beyond reactive backup approaches towards proactive data resilience strategies that can withstand sophisticated cyber attacks while supporting business operations. In an era where data breaches and ransomware attacks make headlines daily, this transformation from backup to resilience isn’t as essential and, once SMEs start talking about their resilience needs with their partners, can be faster to deploy and less of a cost burden than they expect.