Data Resiliency: Why do you need it?

With evolving cyber threats and sudden disasters, data resiliency is among the critical components of any business. Data resiliency helps businesses provide continuous, uninterrupted services to their customers. This article explains data resiliency, its importance for current businesses, and the most common strategies to achieve it. It also describes the advantages and challenges of achieving business data resiliency. 

What is Data Resiliency?

Data resiliency refers to an organization’s ability to quickly bounce back in the event of a disruption, such as a power outage, natural disaster, or cyberattack.

Data resiliency is typically included within a disaster recovery (DR) plan and requires data to be backed up regularly and stored in multiple locations. Due to this, if one location is compromised, users and applications can still access the data they need to continue working with minimal disruption.

When developing a data resilience strategy, it’s critical to include other tactics in addition to creating backups in multiple locations. We’ll be reviewing additional components to consider a little further down.

What is Data Resiliency in the cloud?

In the cloud computing era, data resiliency takes on a new dimension. Cloud-based data resiliency involves leveraging the scalability, redundancy and distributed nature of cloud infrastructure to ensure data availability and durability. By storing data across multiple data centers and employing advanced backup and recovery mechanisms, organizations can achieve high levels of data resiliency in the cloud.

Why is it important?

Every business relies on data to make informed decisions, optimize operations, and maintain a competitive edge. To ensure your operations are not disrupted, data resiliency is essential in safeguarding your organization’s information and ensuring continuous availability and security, even when unexpected challenges or adverse events occur.

Without a robust data resiliency strategy, organizations are vulnerable to data loss, corruption, or unauthorized access that come in the form of:

• Cyberattacks and ransomware: Cybercriminals exploit vulnerabilities in systems to steal, encrypt, or destroy sensitive data.
• Hardware and software failures: System malfunctions or crashes can lead to data loss or corruption.
• Human error: Accidental data deletion or modification by employees can cause significant damage.
• Natural disasters: Floods, earthquakes, and fires can lead to physical damage that impacts data storage facilities.

In these situations, the losses can be devastating and significantly impact your organization’s operations, revenue, and reputation. Data resiliency encompasses the strategies companies use when faced with these challenges. By planning for disruption, organizations help minimize downtime and maintain business continuity even in the worst possible scenarios.

Key elements of Data Resiliency

• Backup. It’s a primary way to ensure data can be restored from a copy. However, how often you need to back up data, how long you need to store it, and whether you should store data on a cloud or not, depends largely on the company’s needs. Not to mention that backups must also be protected from physical damage and cyber threats.
• Replication. It helps maintain real-time or near-real-time copies of data in separate locations. Replication can be synchronous and asynchronous, while its speed depends on various factors such as physical distance.
• Failover. Failover mechanisms automatically switch operations to a secondary system or location when the primary system is compromised, ensuring continued data accessibility.
• Fault tolerance. It enables systems to operate seamlessly even in the face of failures, offering a continuous user experience. But fault tolerance can also be costly as you may need multiple sets of hardware.
• Data protection. Strong encryption, firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and access control can help protect data from unauthorized access, data breaches, corruption, and theft.
• Disaster recovery planning. Creating a plan and testing it helps prepare for potential disruptions, ensuring an efficient data recovery.

Some benefits

The immediate benefits of achieving data resiliency are numerous and include guarding against losses of data, boosting reliability, and minimizing downtime.

Another prime asset of achieving data resiliency is that it aids in the cause of data retention and supports the policies of persistent data management, which helps organizations remain in compliance with binding requirements concerning the archiving of business and legal data.

But perhaps the greatest benefit is how it can safeguard a company’s reputation. Proper data resiliency can keep a business running smoothly with regular business functions being executed properly and do all of this in a manner so that the company’s reputation never suffers—even though that organization might experience a data loss. With proper data resiliency measures integrated, many data losses can be immediately managed and their effects mitigated.

In a best-case scenario, an organization’s customer base will not even know such a data loss has occurred. However, even if the loss becomes common knowledge, it may not harm that company’s reputation, provided that it appears that the company has acted in good faith, has tried to protect customer data, and is working to take all responsible measures necessary to thwart cyberattacks from that point on.

After numerous high-profile incidents, cyberattacks have lost some of their initial shock value. The public has learned that cyberattacks can target and disrupt any organization, and such attacks are likely to be an unfortunate and ongoing aspect of modern life. Typically, consumers now don’t blame a company that experiences a data loss. They only blame the company if it fails to adequately respond to the incident and doesn’t protect consumer data moving forward.

Conclusion

Data resiliency is the ability of organizations to continue business operations even after a disaster, providing continuous, uninterrupted service to their consumers. It is critical to have strong data resiliency due to increasing cyber threats and the consequences of critical data becoming unavailable for the end users.

There are several strategies to improve data resiliency, including data backups, encryption, using cloud services, disaster recovery strategies, and providing employees with necessary education on data resiliency. Finally, the field of data resilience looks promising with new and evolving technologies like AI, ML, and IoT.