Data Resiliency

Being data resilient is much more than just backing up your data. Things such as data recovery pace, RTO (Recovery Time Objective), RPO (Recovery Point Objective), disaster recovery, data security, and deduplication are important parts of a successful data resilience strategy. 

As technologies widen and more and more tools come into the array, it’s important that all the data stored in these new systems are backed up and ready to be recovered. For example, product development teams are using Kubernetes on AWS to modernize existing applications and build new applications. However, several of these are partially protected or completely unprotected.

Secure data backup

The first principle of data resiliency is to securely back up the entire data set successfully. The backup process should not impede the workload where the data resides. The data protection software should adhere to the existing data backup best practices such as the 3-2-1 backup rule, air-gapped and immutable backups, frequent error-free backups, encryption during data transit and at rest, and so on. It’s also very important that the stored backed-up data is protected from physical and cyber mishaps.

Easy and fast data recovery

Being able to quickly recover a part or the entire data set is a crucial part of being data resilient. You should have the ability to recover a single file from accidental deletion, an entire server in case it goes down, and a very large data set in the event of a ransomware attack. The data recovery process should meet the RTO and RPO requirements of your organization. An added advantage would be to enable users to restore their emails and files. This eases the burden on the IT team.

Segmentation of critical and non-critical data

Not all data is the same. For example, if you are a bank, the servers handling the money transfer transactions are far more important than your email server. Accurate segmentation of data helps you prioritize what data you should recover first in case of a disruption.

Protect all workloads

Be it hybrid workloads (Nutnanix, VMware, MS SQL, Oracle), SaaS apps (Microsoft 365, Salesforce), endpoints (laptops), or even Amazon EC2, you must protect your data wherever it lives. Leaving out a workload can be detrimental to your business and make it more vulnerable.

Company-wide awareness

Invest in training that helps employees understand the practices they need to follow to make your organization data resilient. Everyone from C-level executives to contractors should ensure that they always follow security best practices and leave no gaps.

Automate as much as possible

If you are waiting for human validation before you launch a remedial action for any threat, you are putting a lot at risk. Server outages or ransomware attacks can happen any time during the day. Your data resilient practices should automatically and immediately kickstart a failsafe and alert you about the threat. It might be several minutes or a few hours before a human starts investigating the root cause of the attack. In such cases, runbooks and playbooks are standard and efficient ways to deal with the situation.

Test RPO and RTO frequently

Organizations often don’t have a process of regularly and frequently verifying the defined RPO and RTO. Your data is changing every month and so is the number of applications that your organization uses. This number is always increasing. You must ensure that you still meet your RPO and RTO requirements after the changes happen

Keep up with the threats in your industry

Be sure to keep up with the threats affecting the industry you are in. Many strains of ransomware today target particular industries. The more information you have, the better your preparation will be against impending attacks.

Druva’s 100% SaaS Data Protection and 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. This enables your organization to:

Protect

• Ensure data integrity and availability with air-gapped, immutable backups in object-based storage with built-in zero-trust security
• Stay ahead of attackers and protect backup infrastructure with automatic vulnerability scans, patches, and upgrades
• Only solution offering a cloud-first SaaS approach to security, including a truly secure Data Lock, and automatic patching

Prepare

• Improve security posture and detect problems before they cause damage with a centralized security and governance dashboard
• Recover deleted data with self-service Rollback Actions 
• Respond faster with proactive alerts from the Druva CloudOps team
• Only at-scale SaaS solution with a posture and observability dashboard powered by AI-ML

Recover

• Prevent data loss due to point-in-time recovery and get the most recent clean data from the entire time frame of an attack with Curated Recovery 
• Automate incident response, prevent reinfection, and empower forensics with SOAR integrations

Overcome data risks to your business in a few key steps — read the new For Dummies guide to learn how!