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Everything You Need to Know
About Data Resilience

Why it's important and what it means to you

What Is Data Resilience?

However strong your cyber defense may be, odds are ransomware or other breaches will eventually find a way through. Organizations are shifting to a new approach to data protection, defense, and recovery called data resiliency — which places a new emphasis on recoverability and bouncing back from data breaches, rather than threat prevention alone. 

Data resiliency is having your organization’s data always available and accessible despite unexpected business disruptions such as cyber attacks. In the event of data loss, your team will have clean data backed up that’s easily and quickly accessible, enabling a smooth transition back to business with minimal impact on your operations. Ideally, this will simplify data management and improve other data functions such as eDiscovery and long-term retention.

What Is the Importance of Data Resilience?

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Protects business integrity
 

A business disruption such as a cyber attack can cripple an organization and slow down operations or, worse, bring the business to a halt. Data resiliency ensures that you protect your business from unnecessary interruptions and can get things back on track with minimal downtime.

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Standardizes data protection across workloads

Modern organizations use a variety of workloads to store data, including the data center, SaaS applications, and more. A good data resilience strategy ensures that data protection policies are applied consistently to all the resources. Data backups should be segregated by critical and non-critical data and not by workload type.

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Retains customer trust
 

Customers are always eager to know how you store their data and what safety measures are in place. A data resilience framework helps customers understand the safety measures that you have in place and how you plan to mitigate the risks if something goes awry.

Understanding Data Resilience Requirements

Identifying critical assets

Organizations should spend time creating a disaster recovery plan, and take inventory of which systems, processes, etc. should be given priority in recovery to minimize downtime in the event of an outage. Calculating and agreeing on an RPO/RTO is an important first step to measuring the success of your team’s disaster recovery plan and ability to bounce back from data loss or an outage.

Automating data protection

Many SaaS-based backup and data protection platforms, such as Druva, automate backup and recovery processes. These systems can identify the most recent clean version of each of your files, and curate recovery for you, significantly reducing downtime.

Watching for backup vulnerabilities and threats

Many data resiliency platforms come with AI/ML-based security monitoring — checking for unusual data activity, bulk deletions, and more, and flagging these actions to IT.

Automating responses to prevent the spread of threats

Incident response should prevent reinfection, and empower forensics with SIEM/SOAR integrations.

Quickly recovering clean and complete data

An ideal solution, like Druva, will prevent data loss with point-in-time recovery and provide the most recent, clean data from the entire time frame of an attack.

3 Key Steps to Achieving Data Resilience

#1

Take a SaaS-based approach

SaaS-based data protection was born to live in the cloud. It is optimized for performance and scalability and offers centralized management of backup and recovery processes, along with consistent performance, even with petabytes of data. Plus, you’ll find the costs lower than either hybrid cloud or hosted cloud solutions. Management is greatly simplified with most processes automated, and many cloud solutions provide a single easy-to-use interface to view the status of backups across all workloads — data center, SaaS apps, and more. 

#2

Strengthen cyber defense

An ideal SaaS solution will enable the protection of critical data, ensuring integrity and availability with air-gapped and immutable storage. Zero-trust security limits data access to only those with the proper credentials. The solution enables preparation for advanced threats and tomorrow’s risks, automatically detecting and reporting on unusual activity like bulk deletions, and allowing self-service roll-back to clean data. Finally, SaaS delivers accelerated recovery in the event of infection or data loss. It should automate incident response, prevent reinfection, and empower forensics with SOAR integrations.

#3

Transform backup data into a business asset

Traditional backup processes can be complex and expensive if they involve moving data from on-premises or cloud-hosted solutions. It’s possible to lower storage costs by up to 50% with automated global deduplication capabilities across storage tiers, automated storage tiering, and a lower-cost archive storage tier. In a SaaS-based solution, these processes are fully automated and policy-driven, with centralized dashboards and predictable costs. File-level search and recovery is fast across warm and cold storage tiers. It yields storage insights to help with long-term planning. It makes the process of eDiscovery much more powerful and simplifies compliance with various privacy and residency requirements.

Examples of Data Resilience Techniques and Strategies

High-frequency backups

High-frequency backups aim to solve issues with highly transactional, frequently-changing data by backing up as often as up to every hour. As a result, data loss or corruption can be quickly and easily corrected by leveraging more accurate, point-in-time backups.

Mirrored copies of data

Data mirroring refers to the real-time copying of data, from one location to a storage medium. Data mirroring is commonly used when multiple exact copies of data are required in multiple locations to meet compliance requirements.

Synchronous and asynchronous replication

The difference between these two approaches resides in how data is written to the replica. Synchronous products write data to both the primary and replication simultaneously. In contrast, asynchronous replication copies data to the replica after the data is already written to the primary storage. It is most common for replication to occur on a scheduled basis. There are advantages to each approach, ie. reduced bandwidth usage for asynchronous replication, and data change accuracy for synchronous.

Air-gapped backups from your primary environment

An air-gapped backup is a copy of your data that’s offline and inaccessible. Without an internet or other network connection it’s impossible for your backup to be remotely accessed, hacked, or corrupted. Traditional air-gapping referred to tape backups, but the cloud now offers an equivalent to air-gapped tape. Learn more about how Druva air-gaps backups to keep data immutable in the solution brief.

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Separation of data from metadata

Modern architecture splits data from metadata and enables dynamic resource scaling. By separating out the metadata, the architecture can independently optimize both metadata and data operations. With dynamic scaling, the system can support the most intense workloads, without over-provisioning resources.

Automatic updates of backup software

Over-the-air updates of backup software allow the constant improvement of the product to boost data resiliency and increase resistance to cyber threats. In SaaS applications, these updates take place automatically, ensuring the end-user has access to the most recent, best version of the software without having to take any action manually.

Object storage for backups

Object storage delivers increased resiliency while mitigating costs. Objects remain protected by storing multiple copies of data over a distributed system; if one or more nodes fail, the data can still be made available, in most cases, without the application or the end user ever being impacted. Read the blog for a closer look at how object storage differs from, and provides advantages over, block storage.

Off-site redundancy

Different from backups, redundancy maintains a live copy of your services running in real-time and available instantly to ensure 100% server uptime. Entirely separate from on-site servers, redundant sites operate on a different network to ensure no interruption of services in the event of an outage.

Cloud-based disaster recovery

Cloud DR helps protect resources and ensure business continuity. Businesses negate the effects of disasters or outages by quickly restoring data from backups in the cloud. By leveraging the capabilities of the cloud, businesses solve many of the issues of traditional DR and accelerate recovery without dedicated hardware while reducing costs.

Day-to-Day Data Resilience Use Cases

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Enterprise cloud backup

Enterprise cloud backup eliminates cost and complexity of managing global backup infrastructure. Reclaim admin hours spent managing and maintaining infrastructure and storage.

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Disaster recovery
 

Cloud disaster recovery allows organizations to improve business resilience while reducing costs, and complexity. Easily meet RTO and RPO requirements with simple and reliable failover orchestration of both VMware and AWS workloads.

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Ransomware recovery

Ideal cloud data protection pairs defense-in-depth security with workflow and recovery automation tools to improve response time, prevent reinfection, and reduce data loss. Plus, receive 24×7 fully-managed security operations.

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Enabling eDiscovery

Policy and rules automation provide compliance monitoring tools to easily keep account of key regulations, report violations, and implement defensible deletion.

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Compliance

Proactively and automatically monitor data compliance across all your workloads, receive and respond to violation alerts from a single dashboard. An ideal SaaS-based solution will provide pre-built policy templates to monitor and respond to violations of regulations like GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA.

Druva's Data Resilience Solution

The 100% SaaS Druva Data Resiliency Cloud provides a single system of records across data protection, security, and governance stacks, enabling better collaboration across key IT functions driving business resilience and compliance.

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Performing more than 4 billion backups per year with over 220 PB of data under management for thousands of satisfied customers, including more than 60 of the Fortune 500, Druva boasts an NPS score of 89 and is a proven leader for 100% SaaS data protection.

Druva was named a Visionary back-to-back years in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Enterprise Backup and Recovery Solutions, as well as a leader in the Forrester Wave for SaaS application data protection.

Data within the Druva platform is kept air-gapped and secure, and protected by a $10 million Data Resiliency Guarantee against five key forms of data loss.

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Data Resiliency for Dummies eBook

Your business is constantly threatened by data loss due to accidental deletion, ransomware attacks, and other threats. The best defense is boosting data resiliency in the cloud to simplify the management, maintenance, and cost of securing your data.

Data Resiliency For Dummies, Druva Special Edition, explores these concepts in depth, including what makes resiliency challenging and how to achieve it. The guide outlines the benefits of SaaS-based data protection, a multi-layered cyber defense, as well as how to automate processes, and takes a closer look at today’s leading use cases.

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Listen to the Podcast to Hear Druva Experts Discuss Data Resiliency In-Depth

Learn more