Business resilience has evolved far beyond traditional backup and disaster recovery. As organisations become increasingly dependent on cloud services, SaaS applications and AI-powered technologies, the ability to restore data alone is no longer enough. Today's organisations need to rapidly restore critical business operations, protect against cyber threats and maintain continuity in an increasingly complex risk landscape.
These themes emerged during an executive roundtable hosted by AvePoint in partnership with ITWeb, where business, IT and risk leaders discussed the changing nature of resilience and the challenges organisations face in preparing for disruption.
"Resilience is no longer just about recovering data. It's about understanding what matters most to the business and ensuring critical operations can continue during a disruption," said Ashok Marimuthu, strategic consultant at AvePoint.
The resilience challenge
Organisations today face an expanding range of risks, from ransomware and accidental data loss to insider threats, AI-driven risks and technology failures. At the same time, regulatory and operational resilience requirements continue to increase.
A key challenge highlighted during the roundtable was that many organisations still struggle to identify which systems, users and datasets are most critical to business operations and should therefore be prioritised during recovery.
"As organisations adopt more cloud services and AI-powered technologies, resilience strategies must evolve beyond maintaining a backup copy of data," Ashok noted.
Not all data is equal
In the event of a cyber attack or operational disruption, restoring everything at once is often impractical. Instead, organisations should focus on restoring a minimum viable business – the people, systems and information required to continue serving customers and operating effectively.
This requires greater visibility of organisational data, active business involvement in defining priorities and a clear understanding of which services are critical to day-to-day operations.
"The objective is not to restore everything first. The priority is restoring the systems and information that allow the organisation to continue operating as quickly as possible," said Ashok.
From backup to resilience operations
AvePoint refers to this modern approach as resilience operations (ResOps) – bringing together data protection, governance, cyber resilience and recovery into a single operational framework.
The focus shifts from simply recovering data to maintaining business continuity through four key capabilities:
- Visibility: Understanding where critical information resides.
- Protection: Safeguarding identities, workloads and business data.
- Recovery: Prioritising the restoration of critical users, applications and services.
- Validation: Testing and validating recovery readiness before incidents occur.
Restoring business operations faster
Traditional disaster recovery often attempts to restore everything at once, which can take weeks during large-scale incidents such as ransomware attacks, mass deletions or tenant-wide disruptions.
AvePoint's Rapid Recovery System takes a different approach by helping organisations restore their minimum viable business first. Rather than treating recovery as an all-or-nothing exercise, organisations can identify and prioritise critical users, workloads and services before restoring less critical systems.
The recovery process begins by assessing the impact of an incident, restoring critical identities and access, recovering essential infrastructure and then executing predefined recovery plans aligned to business priorities. Microsoft 365 workloads, including Exchange Online, SharePoint and OneDrive, can be accelerated through Express Recovery, enabling organisations to restore critical services and users first.
This prioritised approach helps organisations recover critical business functions in hours or days rather than waiting for a complete environment recovery before operations can resume.
"Recovery should focus on restoring business operations, not simply restoring data. By identifying critical systems and users in advance, organisations can recover what matters most first and significantly minimise disruption," said Ashok.
Governance and data protection matter
The roundtable also highlighted the growing connection between governance and resilience.
Organisations cannot effectively protect or recover information they do not understand. By combining data discovery, risk identification, retention management and policy enforcement, organisations can better understand where critical information resides and align recovery strategies with business priorities.
Understanding data access patterns and business dependencies enables more informed decisions about what should be protected, prioritised and recovered first.
Looking ahead
As organisations continue to embrace cloud and AI, resilience is becoming a board-level priority. The organisations best positioned for the future will be those that can identify critical information, protect their most important assets and rapidly restore business operations when disruption occurs.
"The future of resilience lies in bringing visibility, protection, governance and recovery together into a single operational framework. Organisations that can do that will be far better positioned to manage risk and maintain business continuity in an increasingly complex digital world," concluded Ashok.
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