Data resilience and storage — a primer for your business

Data resilience has become increasingly vital to modern businesses. Your ability to protect against and recover from malicious attacks and other outages greatly contributes to your business success. Resilient primary storage is a core component of data resilience, but what is it exactly?

Read on to get answers to important questions about data resilience and to see how resilient primary storage for your data can help your business thrive.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• What is data resilience?
• 5 characteristics of a resilient storage solution
• How can I ensure my organization has data resilience?
• Next steps

Data resilience is the ability to protect against and recover quickly from a data-destructive event, such as a cyberattack, data theft, disaster, failure or human error. It’s an important component of your organization’s overall cyber resilience strategy and business continuity plan.

Keeping your data — and your entire IT infrastructure — safe in the event of cyberattack is crucial. A 2020 report by Enterprise Strategy Group found that 60% of enterprise organizations experienced ransomware attacks in the past year and 13% of those organizations experienced daily attacks¹. Each data breach, according to the Ponemon Institute, can cost an average of USD 4.24 million². By 2025, cybercrime costs are estimated to reach USD 10.5 trillion (link resides outside ibm.com) annually, according to Cybersecurity Ventures³.

In addition to combating malicious attacks, data resilience is vital to preventing data loss and helping you recover from natural disasters and unplanned failures. Extreme weather events such as floods, storms and wildfires are increasing in number and severity, and affect millions of people and businesses all over the world each year. In 2018, the global economic stress and damage from natural disasters totaled USD 165 billion (link resides outside ibm.com), according to the World Economic Forum in their 2020 Global Risks Report⁴.

While the first order of business is to prevent data-destructive events from occurring, it’s equally important to be able to recover when the inevitable happens and an event, malicious or otherwise, takes place.

Your preparedness and ability to quickly respond hinges on where you are storing your primary data. Is the solution resilient? Ensuring your data stays available to your applications is the primary function of storage. So, what are the characteristics of resilient primary storage that can help?

A resilient storage solution provides flexibility and helps you leverage your infrastructure vendors and locations to create operational resiliency – achieving data resilience in the data center and across virtualized, containerized and hybrid cloud environments.

Characteristics of resilient primary storage include:

1. 2-site and 3-site replication: capable of traditional 2-site and 3-site replication configurations – on premises, on cloud, or hybrid – using your choice of synchronous or asynchronous data communication. This gives you confidence that your data can survive a localized disaster with very little or no data loss, also known as recovery point objective (RPO).
2. High availability: the ability to gain access to your data quickly, in some cases immediately, which is also known as recovery time objective (RTO). Resilient storage has options for immediate failover access to data at remote locations. Not only does your data survive a localized disaster, but your applications have immediate access to alternate copies as if nothing ever happened.
3. Enhanced high availability: multi-platform support. This means RPO/RTO options available regardless of your choice in primary storage hardware vendors or public cloud providers.
4. Immutable copy: making copies that are logically air-gapped from the primary data, and further making that copy unchangeable, or immutable, in the event your primary data copy becomes infected.
5. Encryption: protecting your data from bad actors and guarding against prying eyes or outright data theft.

Many organizations have a mix of different on-premises storage vendors or have acquired storage capacity over time, meaning they have different generations of storage systems. Throw in some cloud storage for a hybrid environment and you may find it quite difficult to deliver a consistent approach to data resilience.

A first step is modernizing the storage infrastructure you already have. Fortunately, this is not something that requires you wait for a lease to expire or for data growth to drive a new hardware purchase. You can get started right away with software-defined storage from IBM on your existing storage from most any vendor.

IBM FlashSystem® and IBM SAN Volume Controller, both built with IBM Spectrum Virtualize software, include a Safeguarded Copy function that creates immutable (read-only) copies of your data to protect against ransomware and other threats. This functionality is also available on IBM Storage for mainframe systems.

Additionally, you can combine the data resilience capabilities of IBM FlashSystem and IBM Spectrum® Protect Plus to create a highly resilient IT infrastructure for on-premises, cloud and containerized environments. IBM Spectrum Protect Plus is available at a special rate when purchasing a FlashSystem 5000 or 5200.

If you want to learn more about data resilience and storage, here are a few next steps you can take:

• Take the IBM Cyber Resilience Assessment. The assessment includes a workshop, a detailed final report, and a roadmap of recommended improvements.
• Schedule a consultation with us. Just fill out this form and our storage experts will contact you or call sales at +1 877-426-4264 (Priority code: Storage).