Feature – Reducing the impact of cyber attacks with rapid detection

Author: Simon Rowley

By Eric Herzog, CMO at Infinidat.

There are constant headlines reporting cyber attacks on enterprises and preparing for the inevitability of cyber crime is absolutely critical. Yet despite such a widespread expectation of cyber attacks, there’s a concerning lack of preparedness. Research conducted by the Ponemon Institute in 2023 suggests that only 35% of enterprises say they feel properly prepared to deal with a cyber security incident. And even among the ones that are prepared, there’s a general acceptance of vulnerabilities within their defences and reactions that they are not fully prepared for. Hackers will exploit this to the maximum.

Three major costs of a cyber attack

When a cyber attack does occur, and enterprise data becomes compromised, huge costs, operational disruption, and reputational damage are incurred. Let’s examine these impacts individually. The financial impact of data breaches is substantial and continues to rise. According to the Ponemon research, the global average cost of a data breach increased by 10% to $4.88 million, which is the highest ever recorded.

Cyber attacks, as we all know, also significantly disrupt business operations. According to Statista research, it took an average of 64 days to contain a breach in 2024 and in cases where stolen or compromised credentials were involved, this increases significantly. Such an extended period of disruption can severely impact a company’s ability to function normally, potentially leading to lost productivity, lost revenue, and lost profits.

And let’s not overlook the reputational impact of data breaches, which leads to loss of business in the longer term. This is, perhaps, the most costly aspect of a cyber attack, because the intangible values of customer trust and loyalty are significantly affected. Depending on the industry, this cost can vary significantly, with the healthcare, financial services, technology and service sectors being the most expensive to recover from. In the UK, the Ponemon research cites the average cost of recovery within these industries was £5m.

What enterprises need to properly prepare for and counter these attack threats is powerful, easy-to-manage data protection and backup storage solutions, combined with guaranteed cyber storage resilience. This is because the speed at which a cyber attack occurs requires immediate and coordinated responses – from all levels of an organisation.

A need for ‘baked in’ cyber storage resilience

Using a software-defined storage architecture with integrated cyber storage resilience technology is one good way to minimise these impacts. When cyber storage resilience is embedded into enterprise storage, it allows for sub-second protection response and recovery times. This is critical because, when confronting a cyber attack, losing time can cost tremendous amounts of money. Ultra-fast response times will significantly reduce a cyber event’s potential cost and recovery impact. For instance, a backup repository involving multiple petabytes of storage could be fully recoverable in just a few minutes.

Here’s an actual, real-world use case example to illustrate this. To protect the client’s confidentiality, I will just call them ‘Fortune Global 500 company’. This actual customer needed to improve its restore times for their Oracle databases without impacting on service. They were able to achieve an average seven-times improvement to the backup time of their databases using Infinidat. They also achieved a 97% reduction in recovery time for full copies and a 95% reduction to full physical back up times. In addition, backup integrity was fully verified and, after verification, could be converted to an immutable copy to protect against cyber attacks.

The five cyber essentials

What core cyber storage resilience capabilities were essential for this enterprise to have in place? There are five:

• Logical air-gapped protection: Leveraging the ability to isolate data sets logically, fully, and completely, without requiring secondary environments.
• Immutable snapshots: Completely hardened and unchangeable data set protection, helping ensure your business is following a proper set of best practices.
• Fenced forensic network: Dedicated networking resources activated only to surface a copy of the data to be inspected, tested, or recovered from, within a fully isolated, tightly managed network environment.
• Near-instantaneous recovery of any size backup repository.
• Data centre-wide cyber security integration, where enterprise storage is seamlessly integrated with data centre-wide cyber security software applications.

AI powered scanning

To extend their cyber prevention further, advanced cyber detection capabilities can validate the integrity of immutable snapshots using powerful, AI-based scanning engines. Comprehensive machine learning technology can detect ransomware and malware attacks with up to 99.99% accuracy, enabling enterprises to quickly and easily identify a last known good copy for rapid, intelligent recovery. This provides complete reassurance that the data has not been compromised.

A new standard for cyber resilient storage

What enterprises need from their storage platform today are outstanding performance levels, guaranteed availability, cyber storage resilience, ease of use, and cost savings – at scale and for any backup/recovery data protection use case. By their very nature, backups are the last resort for protecting and recovering critical data. The storage location for this critical data should embody enterprise-calibre reliability and resilience. It should come with SLA-based guarantees for performance, 100% availability, and cyber storage recoverability. This sets the standard for enterprise storage and backup use cases, ensuring the utmost safety and recoverability for critical, backed-up data. Infinidat allows customers to choose the solution that best fits their use case or environment, with a consistent and easy-to-manage set of solutions to save them time and money.

Action is critical

Extensive research clearly indicates that preparing for cyber attacks is not just advisable, but critical for business survival in the digital age. The inevitability of cyber threats means companies must invest in comprehensive preparation strategies to mitigate their risks, protect their assets, and ensure rapid response capabilities. This proactive approach is essential for maintaining business continuity and safeguarding against potentially devastating financial and reputational damages.

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