Why cyber-resilience matters — and how to achieve it

Today’s word of the day is cyber-resilience. Read on for an overview of the concept, and register for an upcoming webinar to get a more in-depth presentation and answers to your questions.

Cyber-resilience is the ability to bounce back quickly from a cyber incident. And the fact of the matter is that, unless your organization is very lucky indeed, sooner or later it will suffer a successful ransomware attack.

And if your company has cultivated cyber-resilience, it will be able to recover and return to normal operations quickly and easily. But if it hasn’t, it will find its operations massively disrupted, for weeks or even months. The average time to recover from ransomware is 24 weeks. That’s nearly two quarters. Can your organization survive a disruption that long—or longer? 

Evolving threats — and old favorites

While ransomware isn’t new, it is always evolving, using new technologies to more effectively target your business-critical data. 

For example, ransomware crooks have eagerly attacked data stored in Microsoft 365 for as long as the platform has existed. They understand that many users rely only, or primarily, on Microsoft’s native data-retention features for data protection—despite the fact that they are inadequate for the purpose and that the vendor’s Terms of Service recommend the use of a third-party backup solution. 

The specific tactics keep evolving, and the use of AI in particular is quickly making their attacks more effective, as well as more numerous by far. 

But they are also going after new targets. One example is Entra ID data—what used to be Active Directory. A lot of organizations don’t give much thought to protecting that category of data. But when it is corrupted or destroyed, it has the potential to dramatically impact your ability to conduct normal, everyday business tasks.

What’s more, modern ransomware is increasingly good at finding and corrupting your backup systems, the very thing you rely on to ensure you can restore lost data.

And here’s something you may not realize: When your data goes to backup, it could very well contain some malware that has gone undetected. That means that even in the best-case scenario, where you are able to restore your lost data from backup, you may be putting a dangerous attack right back where it was, just waiting to be activated by one user’s unwise click.

Achieving cyber-resilience

Ultimately, the key to achieving and maintaining cyber-resilience comes down to having a modern, cloud-enabled, full-featured backup system in place. Here are a few things to look for:

• The ability to use encryption and obfuscation to cloak backup systems in order to prevent them from being discovered and corrupted by ransomware

• The ability to back up and protect Entra ID data along with all the rest of your Microsoft 365 data

• Redundant, multi-copy backup storage in the cloud

• Simple, highly granular data-restore functions that let you easily get back whatever you need, from a single file to a full cluster of virtual servers

• The ability to scan backed-up data during restoration in order to detect and remove any malware that went undetected prior to being backed up.

Get the whole story in a new webinar

On January 15, 2025, there will be a highly informative webinar where you’ll gain an in-depth understanding of the risks posed by today’s advanced ransomware, as well as the practical, actionable information you need to gain true cyber-resilience. 

Be sure to attend — so that if (when) the worst happens, you can be back up and running in mere hours, rather than weeks or months. Because that’s what cyber-resilience is all about. Take a few seconds to reserve your spot right now. (And if you’re reading this later than January 15, the same link will take you to a recorded version of the event.)