Today’s technology environment is scaling at an explosive rate. This makes for thrilling growth opportunities but the innovation invites cyberthreats. And data integrity remains at the mercy of natural disasters, power outages, and human error.
Data resilience is the measure of how quickly and thoroughly an organization can fight off, overcome, or bounce back from damage to a server, network, storage system, or entire data center.
From Traditional Backup to True Data Resilience
Traditional backup methods were the first line of defense for resilience. But backup alone is only one aspect of resilience — and it’s been overtaken by racing cybersecurity threats. The old tape-based backup model is slow and complex, with scalability and maintenance issues, highlighting its limitations against today’s sophisticated attacks.
Convergence of Availability, Security, and Compliance
The importance of converging physical security and cybersecurity cannot be overestimated. Networking of security devices and integration of security will eventually make silos obsolete; fast, robust data resilience requires all groups to talk and work together. Data convergence platforms centralize data governance and security controls; they simplify compliance and help organizations attain true resilience against cyberattacks, malicious insiders, and physical disruptions.
Why Traditional Backup Alone Is Not Enough
Destructive cyberattacks such as ransomware, along with ever-tightening, complex regulations are propelling data resilience toward a powerful amalgamation of availability, security, compliance, and business outcomes. Cyberthreats including supply chain attacks, and Ransomware as a Service kits will continue to disrupt business in 2025 and beyond.
To date, security engineers battling ransomware have found no silver bullet. They are seeking a multilayered strategy that includes advanced protection beyond backup —extended detection and response that can identify, preempt, and disable potential attacks.
An organization must educate and warn users to be on guard. People’s hands can outpace their brains and best intentions; that’s why user training is so important. Tabletop exercises simulate an attack, reveal and identify potential gaps and vulnerabilities, and allow users to quickly mitigate harm.
The Role of Compliance and Regulatory Demands
Regulatory compliance is key to a data resilient strategy. What impact do evolving regulations (e.g., DORA) have on backup strategies? Whole, uncorrupted data that can be trusted to remain unchanged has true integrity.
Data that identifies a specific individual is called personally identifiable information or PII (e.g., a social security number, driver’s license number, home address and bank account information). PII plays a principal role in network security; if personal information is breached, the organization and its customers can suffer catastrophic loss and identity theft.
This risk drives today’s growing global regulatory infrastructure. Strict measures and standards of compliance and enforcement have grown up alongside regulations. Handling PII ethically means following regulations, but responsibility goes beyond to how PII is collected, stored, and used for mutually understood purposes and owner consent.
Regulations such as DORA illustrate how financial institutions struggle against growing IT and security challenges — managing complex, sprawling ecosystems and ever-expanding attack surfaces. The European Union (EU) launched DORA in Jan. 2025 to bolster cybersecurity and resilience across the financial sectors including credit institutions, investment firms, insurance enterprises, reinsurance undertakings and more. To stay compliant, SRE and DevOps leaders in finance need to understand the latest best practices for application security and reliability.
The Changing Landscape of Data Infrastructure
The future of data is at a crossroads of unprecedented growth opportunities and challenges. Expanding data center capacity puts massive pressure on power grids worldwide. Data centers are enjoying huge demand, amid limited supply and record rent growth with an increase in joint ventures, particularly in developing countries.
Virtualization and Multi‐Cloud Adoption
The latest version of Veeam Data Platform provides a single system that delivers data resilience across cloud, on-premises and hybrid platforms, bringing together powerful data protection, secure migration, seamless cloud integration, and advanced end-to-end ransomware protection. Major updates to Veeam Data Cloud Vault enable a fully-managed, secure, and cloud-based storage service that leverages Microsoft Azure and simplifies storing backups of mission-critical data and applications offsite for unmatched business resilience.
Virtualization (and now containers) have accelerated granular recovery. Veeam has wide support for many backup sources and restore targets with strengths in Kubernetes and containers, common storage types and specific vendor storage systems, hyperscale IaaS coverage, and broad backup storage target support.
Common mistakes enterprises make when “lifting and shifting” to the cloud
Each cloud migration process is unique to its respective business. It’s vital to fully inventory current systems, applications, and data and how they interconnect, as well as catalogue all assets to be migrated. A gradual, phased migration process that moves systems, data and applications to the cloud must be rigorously tested to ensure data can be secured at rest and in transit. The following oversights can hinder cloud lifting and shifting:
1) Lack of a clear cloud migration strategy
Failure to define a solid, organized cloud migration strategy before getting started. Identify goals and timeline, choose the right cloud deployment model, and the optimal service provider and cloud platform as well as a step-by-step migration plan to prevent delays, unexpected costs, and other unpleasant surprises.
2) Not Assessing Cloud Migration Costs Upfront
Inability to properly estimate overall migration costs. Too often, organizations only focus on obvious surface-level costs like subscriptions and data transfer fees, including long-term cloud service subscription fees, data transfer charges, app and system integration costs, staff training, consultations, and managed service fees for external cloud contractors.
3) Failure to validate data pre-migration
It’s critical to verify data integrity before transferring any information to the cloud. Corrupted, inaccurate, duplicate, or invalid data that gets migrated are potential headaches and can lose customer or client information and yield improper, malfunctioning integrations between systems, data sets, and new cloud management software.
4) Failing to Optimize Prior to Migration
Migrating without first optimizing fully can deliver inefficient, bloated, and underperforming systems. That makes it harder, more time-consuming and costly when cloud migration experts must arrive to deliver a new solution that works right.
5) Lack of Adequate Cloud Training
Finally, many organizations fail to properly train staff on using new cloud tools and processes post-migration. It’s impossible to overstate the importance of fostering a culture of awareness and understanding of the new cloud environment and setup. Identify skill gaps early on, and, if necessary, hire external cloud contractors to fill short-term stopgaps while your team is upskilling.
Managing and Protecting SaaS Data
“Shadow IT” and SaaS sprawl: why many organizations discover data too late.
In these times, there’s an app or a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) for nearly every business process. SaaS offers a convenient, affordable solution to almost ever capability. One risk is Shadow IT, that is, the “outside the ownership or control of IT,” according to Gartner.
Shadow IT opens up serious cybersecurity risks: data leaks, expanded access to cybercriminal attacks, compliance violations, and more. It can take the form of cloud-based software and off-the-shelf software and hardware devices that include hard drives, flash drives, tablets, and smartphones. Many applications on these devices track PII — and are a potential point of access to your network, financials, and protected information.
A key risk of Shadow IT is SaaS sprawl — when SaaS applications reach a number where they can no longer be managed effectively. When an organization uses many different applications that aren’t all talking to each other, data gets more difficult to manage, use, and analyze. This makes accounting, forecasting, lead management, and customer service more difficult.
Contractual vs. technical approaches to backup/restore in SaaS environments
Devising a plan and process for managing Shadow IT and SaaS sprawl opens up an opportunity to check your organizations IT policies, evaluate what’s working and adjust as needed. Major cloud providers typically offer data backup and recovery services, but these services are limited, especially when it comes to SaaS applications. So security on the cloud becomes a shared responsibility between providers and clients.
Addressing these gaps, a robust SaaS disaster recovery and backup platform delivers automatic backup of critical data and files to an off-site location so data can be quickly restored to its original state. SaaS recovery and backup solutions can also archive data to a secure location for long-term storage.
Why Zero Trust Matters for Data Resilience
It’s a key point that threat actors aim to destroy backups — that’s why immutable storage and strong authentication are critical. This hard-won information underscores the growing importance of Zero Trust data resilience to protect both production and backup environments.
Today’s IT landscape creates major challenges for traditional networking security models. Users access data from all types of networks that cannot be fully secured. Virtual private networks (VPNs) build a secure tunnel from the user’s system into the secure perimeter, but they still offer routes for attackers to breach the perimeter.
The Zero Trust model accepts that rather than assuming a network is secure — believe instead that all networks are insecure. This is called “assume breach.” You should have “Zero Trust” that a connection coming from any network endpoint is valid, unless you take additional validation steps. Zero Trust principles call for:
- Least-privilege access — which restricts access to to just what’s essential at a certain, limited time.
- Verify explicitly — always authenticate and authorize using available information like user identity, location, devices, workload, data, etc.
- Assume breach — be certain that breaches will happen. Zero Trust prioritizes detection, response, and rapid recovery to minimize impact of security breaches and blast radius.
What is Zero Trust Data Resilience?
With ransomware threat actors expanding their power and ingenuity, Veeam’s Zero Trust approach, Zero Trust Data Resilience, expands Zero Trust principles to include an organization’s backup environment. Now, securing backup storage is part of a holistic cybersecurity framework (NIST CSF).
Separate Backup Software and Backup Storage With Segmentation and Air Gapping
A key principle of Zero Trust Data Resilience is ensuring that backup software and backup storage are separated. Segmentation and air-gapping are both critical to maintain availability for authorized users while reducing confidentiality risk and preserving integrity by keeping the blast radius extremely limited. Strong controls should be placed around accessing these segregated networks — helping reduce attack surfaces for all networks and their components.
Building a Proactive and Resilient Recovery Plan
Following are considerations for incident response readiness and building a proactive, resilient recovery plan:
- Developing a robust disaster recovery plan
- Rigorously auditing admin accounts and services
- Appointing an incident manager and outlining vendor communication
Proactive resilience delivers sustained, reliable and superior wariness, and quick response, with a holistic, company-wide risk management approach. There are three key steps to navigate uncertainty and clear a pathway for sustained growth: 1) Harness data to discern market trends; 2) evaluate potential impacts; and 3) develop dynamic scenarios to support business decisions.
The Importance of Testing and Simulation
The best time to design your data resilience plan is before you need it. Orchestration and automation enable “instant” verifications and full‐scale disaster simulations.
Aligning Resilience with Business Outcomes
Fostering data resilience means an organization must inventory, prioritize, and store all data, while achieving a full view of its data according to importance so it knows what needs to be restored and in what order.
It’s critical that organizations install the latest upgrades for their disaster recovery software as soon as possible. This calls for collaboration between security, IT ops, and compliance teams to ensure holistic resilience. Companies need full contingency plans for returning normalcy to regular business operations as well as information about administering assets and managing human resources and business partners during this process.
Looking Ahead: AI, Data Intelligence, and Future Challenges
The future holds out substantial and thrilling advances in AI. Driven by exponential data generation increases, advances in computational power, and breakthroughs in sharp algorithmic functionality, we can anticipate a future where insights arrive in real time; decisions are augmented by intelligent systems; and AI-driven automation is everywhere.
AI in Data Resilience
AI-powered malware detection is a horizon that Veeam is welcoming and examining keenly. AI has the capability to reduce risk and accelerate ransomware recovery with zero data loss.
Where We’re Headed
The future of cybersecurity is reflected in Veeam Data Platform, which offers unprecedented early threat and anomaly detection, backup verification, immutability and automated recovery.
Veeam Cyber Secure helps security-first customers implement best practices for ongoing management of their backups to protect before, during, and after a cyber incident. This includes world-class incident response delivered by Coveware by Veeam, to help ensure a customer enterprise is prepared and resilient.
Key Takeaways
- Data Resilience is business critical. It empowers faster innovation, enables compliance, and proactively implements security against ransomware and other threats — safeguarding company brand and customer trust against harm, risk, and loss.
- Multiple stakeholders must align. Ensure that all stakeholders agree on the scope and objectives of the project. Document this in a statement of work or charter that they can refer to as issues arise and tactics/strategies change.
- Testing and automation increase confidence. As software expands, automating testing delivers a faster feedback look, helping detect issues proactively and refine code for more accurate results and reducing cost.
- AI and Zero Trust are the next frontiers. As AI-powered threats grow more sophisticated, organizations must evolve to a zero trust model. Rely on AI to automate security decisions when legacy security methods — VPNs, firewalls and one-time authentication — prove ineffective against AI-driven threats.
Watch the Webinar for Deeper Insights
This webinar delivers the latest insights on how major enterprises and analysts handle data resilience directly from Veeam and Forrester experts. You’ll get a real-world analysis of advanced resilience strategies, how they are deployed, and how they work.
Ready to discover the full picture of modern data resilience? See how your peers are future‐proofing their enterprises!