Disaster Recovery and Data Protection: Future-Proofing your Strategy

In today’s dynamic digital economy, businesses navigate a complex landscape filled with opportunities and challenges. As technology evolves, so do the risks. And so too must your disaster recovery plan.

Here’s a snapshot of what you’re facing: escalating ransomware threats, global supply chain disruptions, political unrest and hacktivism, a skills shortage that increases the chance of human error, escalating costs, stringent compliance requirements and climate change disasters that can result in data loss or system failures.

Yes, we live in a globally connected and sometimes digitally risky world, but it’s not all doom and gloom. There’s a lot to celebrate. Technological advances are fuelling innovation, providing unprecedented access to information, products, and services, and creating new opportunities in healthcare, government, and education for millions worldwide.

While these challenges are real, they also present opportunities. By embracing new possibilities and developing a cloud-smart disaster recovery plan (DRP), you can future-proof your data protection and confidently face emerging threats. To face emerging threats, traditional strategies aren’t enough, but there’s good news here too—in the form of advanced technologies that can help secure your data’s future.

Disaster recovery: A rosy future or rose-coloured glasses? It pays to look ahead

No one wants to listen to the “doom-and-gloomers” who tell us what we don’t want to hear. We’d rather focus on the sunshine and enjoy the bounty when times are good. But in today’s world, we can’t rely on that sunny weather sticking around, so, when it comes to deploying and operating business applications, it’s important to explore what might happen next. And the sunny side of this exercise is that you begin to focus, not on the problems, but on the outcomes in cloud security and disaster recovery.

When the inevitable happens and your business is hit by any kind of data loss event, you need to have a cloud security and disaster recovery plans in place to ensure continuity.

Gartner’s Top Cybersecurity Trends report emphasizes the importance of implementing a comprehensive cloud security plan, “By 2026, organizations prioritizing their security investments based on a continuous threat exposure management program will realize a two-thirds reduction in breaches.”ⁱ

Eyes wide open: Exploring emerging disaster recovery threats in the new digital reality

Here are some trends in cybersecurity that today’s organizations must contend with:

• The ransomware evolution: Ransomware damages are projected to cost victims $265 billion annually by 2031, up from $42 billion in 2024, and $20 billion in 2021.
• Remote work vulnerabilities: Expanded attack surfaces require new security measures, which increase stress and workload for already over-stretched security staff. That trend continues, and experts estimate that by 2025, 32.6 million Americans will work remotely. And it’s just as important to protect your people as it is your data from the effects of cyber threats.
• Supply chain risks: In a digital reality that is all too common, disruptions can impact data availability and security. According to Gartner, 89 percent of companies experienced a supply chain issue within the last five years.

Cloud security and disaster recovery are key to safeguarding your business, but only if you keep up with the trends, embrace new solutions, and focus on key business objectives when implementing a cloud-smart DRP.

How can a cloud-smart disaster recovery plan future-proof my data protection?

Cloud security and data protection tools come in all shapes and sizes, and it’s a good policy to assess what you can afford—and what you can afford to lose—when seeking solutions to your cloud security needs. Knowing your business and detailing your desired outcomes is the first step in a cloud-smart best practices plan.

Keep in mind: you want to be in step with the current digital reality while also looking ahead to anticipate what’s coming next. Future-proofing your cloud security allows you to expand your data protection as new threats arise and your business changes and grows.

Bolster your cloud security with these innovative solutions that take the guesswork out of future-planning:

• Homomorphic encryption: It’s not just a pretty name. Homomorphic encryption offers secure data analysis and processing without exposing sensitive information to corruption or breach. It’s searchable, retrievable, and compliant, and is a powerful technique for protecting the privacy of sensitive data while ensuring regulatory compliance and ethical data analysis. Forward-thinking threat agents steal encrypted data today with plans to crack it later. With the advent of quantum computing, it’s tough to ensure that our encrypted data is “breach proof”. But with homomorphic encryption, data remains secure and protected.
• Advanced encryption: Additional encryption methods, including symmetric, asymmetric, and hashing, enhance security and add another layer of data protection. Other data security measures include immutable storage, which prevents data from being altered, and air-gapped storage, which is offline secure archival data storage.
• Endpoint detection and response tools (EDR): AI and machine learning tools provide advanced data analytics that include threat detection and automated responses to help you repel and respond quickly to data breaches before they spread throughout your network. EDR security solutions continuously log behaviours on endpoints and analyze this data to reveal suspicious activity and anomalies that could signal inside/outside threats such as human error or ransomware.
• Data recovery: Use a clean room and restore from immutable storage to recover data after an attack or human error, thus avoiding the risk of replicating corrupted data and hacker codes.
• Multifactor authentication: With remote working and identity theft on the rise, it’s important to know who is accessing your data. In today’s world of savvy hackers, passwords are not enough. Two-step authentication (2FA) and multifactor authentication (MFA) require users to use another device or authentication app to access data. That way, you can be sure who is at the other end of that data request.
• The human factor: Do your staff know what to do when a threat rears its ugly head? Will they panic and make mistakes or immediately put their cloud-smart plan into action? Preparation, training, and cloud-smart tools make the difference between “chicken little syndrome” and effective disaster recovery.
• Total perimeter protection: At ThinkOn, we take a holistic view of your cybersecurity. Threats to your data security come from all directions, inside and outside your network. Using all means—digital, physical, and intuitive—to protect your data makes sense. That means deploying the best and latest technology in software and hardware, automating system updates and deploying data analysis and compliance tools, and training your staff and partners at all levels of your organization to recognize and respond to threats. In other words, surround your network with a total defence system designed to stop external or internal threats from disrupting your business.

The future’s so bright…

A comprehensive DRP that includes future-proofing strategies lets you relax, put on the shades and soak up some sun—knowing that your digital landscape is protected and your data safe because you have the right technology and disaster planning in place when storm clouds gather.

Follow these future-proofing strategies for your digital plan and you’ll have it made in the shade, whatever the digital weather:

• Tech integration: Incorporate technologies like homomorphic encryption, immutable and air-gapped storage into your strategies.
• Ongoing updates: Regularly reassess, update, and test your data protection and DR plans. Talk to an expert, keep informed on current threats and opportunities, and explore new technologies.
• Building resilience: Foster a culture that supports superior data protection practices with ongoing and frequent testing and training, automated threat reporting, and immediate and no-blame response policies.
• Keep data encrypted: When you access data and unencrypt it, you render that data at risk. ThinkOn Compass™ InfoSearch lets you keep your data protected and offline while you search against that data. It’s safe because data is indexed and stays encrypted.

At ThinkOn, we take an outcome-based approach to data protection. This is a holistic view that considers the entire business, its goals and objectives, its resources, and the threats and opportunities that impact operations and sales. Your cloud service provider can help you put a comprehensive, future-proof DRP in place to safeguard your business.

Ask your data protection expert:

• How to integrate homomorphic encryption and other data protection tools into existing strategies.
• How often should data protection plans be updated and tested?
• How does organizational culture impact data protection and DR?

Learn more about homomorphic encryption for data protection with ThinkOn. Compass™ InfoSearch is air-gapped cold storage that is fully searchable with one of the world’s first commercial applications of a fully homomorphic encryption.