There’s no let up for businesses today in the evolving cyber threat landscape. On average, companies faced 270 attacks each in 2021. With annual growth running at more than 30% per annum and 83% of organizations suffering repeated breaches in 2022, it is a matter of when not if a business will suffer a successful attack.
Despite this backdrop, many businesses have not adjusted their disaster recovery (DR) strategy to factor in ransomware as the most common cause of invoking DR. This is compounded by a continued reliance on traditional backup solutions that are themselves a key target of modern ransomware attacks.
Leaning on cyber-insurance or taking an average $5m hit to the bottom line to pay the attackers (as 82% of UK companies did in 2021) is attracting increasing government criticism, regulatory scrutiny and seeing insurers tighten policy terms and double cyber insurance premiums even when paying up, 67% of victims did not recover all of their data.
Embracing the new disaster recovery mindset
While preventing or minimizing the number of successful attacks followed by detection continues to be a first line of defence, businesses need to supplement that with validating and cleansing data with speed, scale, and efficiency. Additionally, this needs to be provided in a simple-to-use format that avoids burdening IT with hard-to-secure skillsets or driving up reserve and idle IT assets that detract from initiatives to reduce carbon footprint.
Mapping new capabilities in disaster recovery
Immutability of backups is now essential for DR and those backups must now extend for weeks or months that attacks may dwell in systems and provide rapid access for validating any recovery point health or extracting unaffected data.
DR-as-a-Service infrastructure that scales on demand provides a managed infrastructure avoiding substantial new skillset mastery or additional idle IT assets.
With 75% of attacks being undetectable by file signatures, next-gen techniques including behavioural analysis are required to reliably validate as clean and prevent reinfection.
With VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery (VCDR), organizations can tick all these boxes. Thanks to the capabilities of a managed service offering on-demand cloud infrastructure, teams can test and refine their disaster recovery strategy, with guided workflows and next-gen capabilities providing rapid recovery on a single platform for traditional and novel DR needs whilst minimizing IT carbon footprint.
These are just some of the new capabilities in VCDR that can fundamentally make the difference between a swift return to operations and a business struggling to recover in the event of an attack.
To hear all five key capabilities every company needs to rapidly, successfully and cost effectively recover from ransomware, watch our recent webinar on the topic here.
For more information on how VMware is delivering a faster, smarter and secure path to cloud for digital businesses, learn about our multi-cloud solutions here.
