Tag: Disaster Recovery (DR)

As ransomware attacks become increasingly common, businesses must understand the differences between Disaster Recovery (DR) and Cyber Recovery (CR). DR focuses on restoring IT operations after events like natural disasters, hardware failures or accidents. In contrast, CR is specifically designed to handle intentional cyber threats such as ransomware and data breaches.

Consumers are familiar with phishing emails, fraudulent SMS messages and social media scams. However, the scale and complexity of cyberattacks on critical sectors far exceed these relatively simple threats. Entire industries and governmental bodies face increasingly sophisticated attacks. These attacks can cripple essential services, cause significant economic damage and compromise sensitive data on a massive scale.

As organisations emerge from the recent CrowdStrike Falcon incident, I have taken some time to reflect on what we learn from this. Over the past few days, we have seen so many responses and opinions on apportioning liability and estimating the impact of the incident. This point of view takes a different perspective, reflecting on how to respond positively and in a forward-looking way.

Data integrity, security, and availability are vital aspects to consider whether it pertains to personal information, business records, or research data. However, many individuals and organisations often neglect the importance of data maintenance, which can lead to data ‘load shedding’, a term used to describe the loss, corruption, or unavailability of data due to poor data management practices.

In the ever-evolving digital landscape of today, where data stands as the new currency, the demand for skilled data management professionals has become ever apparent. As a critical, ethical, legal and operational concern in modern business, data protection and management are essential for maintaining business continuity.

The world has changed immensely since on-premise infrastructure was considered the best option for company applications. Today, most companies have begun shifting toward off-premise options, such as cloud and co-location.

Given the rapidly evolving cyber threat landscape, there is a growing sense that South African companies will rethink their cloud approaches to better prepare for rapid recovery in the event of potential ransomware and other cyberattacks in 2023.

Data management has traditionally not been high on the priority list for South African organisations, often seen as an afterthought and a grudge purchase. As the threat of ransomware has grown, this attitude is beginning to change.

Ransomware and malware have become part and parcel of business in today’s world. Organisations need to be adequately prepared, which means that their data protection strategy must go beyond the traditional backup, restore, and disaster recovery.

The pandemic has put a significant strain on all industry sectors none more so than in healthcare where there was a need to adopt more data-driven planning and decision-making at lightning speed. At a time when expanding remote care, telemedicine, and m-health initiatives have become the order of the day, the spotlight has turned to the safeguarding of sensitive information at a scale comparable to the financial services sector.