Johannesburg, 03 Dec 2021
IBM, in collaboration with ITWeb, will host a webinar in December to outline how advanced storage solutions support cyber and data resilience.
Keith Kenneth, IBM Systems Business Leader for Storage: South & Central Africa, says that data has become all-important to business resilience, therefore it is crucial that organisations can both protect their data against data destructive events and recover quickly from malicious attacks and other outages that impact data.
According to the Cost of a Data Breach Report 2021, data breach costs are hitting record highs, costing South African companies R46 million on average – the highest cost in the six-year history of the report. “However, data breaches cost a lot more than money. Organisations can take weeks to recover from an attack or other data destructive event. This impacts compliance, brand reputation, future revenues, operations and even customers,” Keith says.
“The World Economic Forum’s (WEF) 2020 Global Risks Report rated cyber attacks as one of the top risks to human welfare, as COVID-19 provided an opportunity for threat actors. According to the 2021 IBM X-Force Threat Intelligence Index, the global pandemic gave sophisticated attackers fresh targets, including organisations involved in the vaccine supply chain.
Organisations are taking the growing risks seriously, Keith says. More organisations are aware of the growing complexity as security incidents became more costly and harder to contain due to drastic operational shifts during the pandemic. In the midst of this complexity, companies that adopted a zero trust security approach are better positioned to deal with data breaches. South African organisations with a mature zero trust strategy had an average data breach cost of R29 million – which was R25 million lower than those who had not deployed this approach at all.
A recent study conducted by Enterprise Management Associates polled large organisations from over 10 different industry verticals and found that nearly all of them (95.1%) viewed data security as a critical or very important factor in their organisations. However, achieving a unified security strategy that encompasses data security can be complex.
“Many organisations are challenged in delivering a consistent approach to data resilience because they have built up a disparate collection of storage hardware and capacity across a hybrid environment,” Keith says.
Keith says IBM FlashSystem data storage solutions can serve as the foundation of a flexible, high performance, cost-efficient cyber resilience approach to significantly reduce the risk of disruption and financial losses due to user errors, malicious destruction or ransomware attacks. With IBM Spectrum Virtualize, organisations can extend a broad spectrum of data services and functionality to over 500 IBM and non-IBM external heterogeneous storage systems, reducing both capital and operational costs while increasing the return on investments in legacy infrastructure.
For enterprise-grade business continuity, disaster recovery and cyber resilience, IBM Spectrum Virtualize offers two site advanced replication and mirroring support based on IBM technologies, such as FlashCopy and Metro and Global Mirror and enhanced by the addition of IBM Spectrum Copy Data Management. The Safeguarded Copy function supports the ability to create cyber-resilient point-in-time copies of volumes that cannot be changed or deleted through user errors, malicious actions or ransomware attacks. The system integrates with IBM Copy Services Manager to provide automated backup copies and data recovery.
IBM Storage for cyber resilience provides end-to-end solutions that can efficiently prevent, detect and respond to cyber attacks as a result of a deep integration between innovative technology and a comprehensive portfolio of software and hardware offerings.
By providing multi-layered security and high resilient functionality, this portfolio can maximise the data protection capabilities to help organisations significantly reduce the risk of business disruption and financial losses due to user errors, malicious destruction or ransomware attacks, says Keith.
The IBM cyber and data resilience webinar will be held on 8 December, outlining how advanced storage solutions support cyber and data resilience and how IBM FlashSystem can help organisations quickly recover from cyber attacks and other disruptions.
For more information and to register for this event, click here.
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