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Data Resilience Strategy

Most companies survive on data in the digital age. It powers operations, inspires decisions, and gives a competitive edge. However, technical failures, natural disasters, hacking, and human mistake can damage data. Data resiliency helps.

Data resilience meaning

Organisations’ ability to function and recover rapidly from data disturbances is called data resilience. The Cyberattacks, hardware failures, natural calamities, and human error can cause disruptions. The idea covers methods to keep data accessible, accurate, and secure despite adverse circumstances.

It’s essentially about ensuring your data is:

When needed, authorised users can access it, minimising downtime.

Accessible: After an incident, retrievable quickly.

Integral: Truthful, comprehensive, and devoid of corruption.

And why is data resilience important?

Loss or disruption of data can harm enterprises. Consider why data resiliency matters:

Reduced Downtime: Data failures can cripple businesses, costing productivity and revenue. Business continuity and interruption downtime are reduced by data resilience.

Data security is essential in the face of escalating cyber threats.

Ensures Regulatory Compliance: Many sectors have high data privacy standards. Data resilience helps organisations avoid steep fines and comply with these rules.

Data breaches can damage client trust and reputation. Data resilience safeguards sensitive data.

A Data Resilience Strategy: Key Elements

Comprehensive data resilience requires multiple layers. These elements are important:

Assessing Data Risk: Discover your data landscape first. Grade essential data assets by sensitivity and analyse threats (cyberattacks, hardware problems, etc.).

Backup/Recover Data: A solid backup strategy follows the 3-2-1 rule: Keep three copies of your data on two media types, one offsite. Test backups regularly to assure recovery.

Prepare for Disasters: Make a disaster recovery plan to recover data and apps after a large disruption. RTOs acceptable downtime and RPOs acceptable data loss are included.

Safeguarding data: Access controls, encryption (at rest and in transit), and intrusion detection systems protect your data from cyberattacks.

The Data Governance: Data governance regulations should clarify data ownership, access, and retention. Consistent data, simplified compliance, and reduced data sprawl result.

Awareness and Training: Employees should learn phishing awareness and password hygiene. Help them understand data resilience and their role in protecting it.

Regularly Test and Monitor: To discover weaknesses and assure proper operation, test your backups, disaster recovery strategy, and security measures regularly. Actively check your systems for questionable behaviour.

Business Continuity: Add data resilience to your business continuity plan. This coordinates disruption responses and reduces organisational impact.

Extra Strategies:

Replicating data across geographically scattered locations protects and ensures availability if one site goes down.

Cloud Backup and Recovery: For smaller enterprises, cloud storage is scalable and cost-effective.

Immutability: WORM (Write Once, Read Many) storage safeguards critical data from unauthorised alterations.

Conclusion

Data resilience requires ongoing examination and development. A thorough data resilience strategy protects important data, reduces risks, and ensures business continuity during disruptions. Data is crucial, thus investing in its resilience is in your company’s future.

IBM Storage Defender and FlashSystem provide unsurpassed data resiliency

IBM Storage Defender

In the case of a cyberattack or other unanticipated circumstance, IBM Storage Defender is a purpose-built end-to-end data resilience solution made to assist enterprises in quickly resuming critical activities. By offering a comprehensive view of data resilience and recoverability across primary and auxiliary storage in a single interface, it streamlines and coordinates business recovery procedures.

AI-powered sensors are used by IBM Storage Defender to swiftly identify risks and anomalies. IBM Storage Defender gathers signals from all available sensors, whether they originate from software (file system or backup-based detection) or hardware (IBM FlashSystem FlashCore Modules).

By integrating into the hardware, the IBM Storage FlashSystem with FlashCore Module 4 (FCM4) can gather and analyse statistics for each and every read and write operation without affecting performance or identifying threats in real-time. Together, IBM Storage Defender and IBM Storage FlashSystem can provide a multilayered strategy that can significantly shorten the time it takes to identify a ransomware assault.

After the data is analysed, IBM Storage Defender is notified of questionable activities originating from the controlled IBM Storage FlashSystem arrays. With the data it has received, IBM Storage Defender initiates a proactive case. A thorough “Open case” page that includes all open cases is displayed. It offers complete details including the type of anomaly, the time and date of the incident, the virtual machines that were impacted, and the storage resources that were impacted. IBM Storage Defender automates key processes and offers suggested measures to speed up data recovery and ensure that critical operations resume as soon as possible.

Safeguarded Copies, which are separated from production settings and cannot be altered or removed, are another form of protection provided by IBM Storage FlashSystem. Due to data transit via the SAN (FC or iSCSI) rather than the network, IBM Storage Defender may restore workloads straight from the most recent trustworthy Safeguarded Copy, greatly cutting down on the amount of time required to resume vital business processes. Furthermore, workloads can be recovered and analysed in a separate environment known as a “Clean Room” before being transferred back to production systems. You may be certain that the data is clean and that business operations can be safely resumed thanks to this verification.

In order to create a protected backup of the compromised volume for offline investigation and follow-up recovery operations, IBM Storage Defender correlates the specific volume in the IBM Storage FlashSystem linked to the virtual machine that is being attacked when it detects a potential threat. This quick, automatic response can greatly shorten the time between getting the alarm, stopping the attack, and then recovering when time is of the essence.

Building operational resilience and trust requires ensuring business continuity. By combining advanced capabilities that complement one another to create a strong data resilience strategy across primary and auxiliary storage, IBM Storage Defender and IBM Storage FlashSystem can be seamlessly integrated to achieve this goal. Together, IBM Storage FlashSystem and IBM Storage Defender successfully ward off cyberattacks and other unforeseen dangers.