Think You Can’t Afford Recovery and Remediation? Think Again. You Have Everything to Lose

Most businesses say they want to prioritize remediation and recovery capabilities, yet when it gets down to it, many ultimately opt not to make these investments. Thirty-five percent require days or even weeks to recover lost SaaS data, and more than a third worry that their company doesn’t have a good enough backup and recovery solution, according to the 2025 State of SaaS Backup and Recovery Report, which surveyed more than 3,700 IT professionals across sectors.

This mindset is problematic because it fails to consider what the company has to lose if it lacks the ability to recover business operations quickly in the event of a cyberattack or other outage.

Just imagine the loss in reputation, accrued regulatory fines, stock value decline and lost business you would face if you ceased operations for several days, weeks or even months. 

According to The Hidden Costs of Downtime report by Oxford Economics, downtime from cyber incidents such as ransomware costs Global 2000 companies an estimated $400 billion annually, or roughly 9% of annual profits — a staggering financial impact of operational disruption.

Businesses that can’t recover rapidly and control their losses could be lost forever.

Here’s how to avoid that by strengthening your defenses and recovering from attacks faster.

Educate Your Teams About How to Avoid Cyber Risk

Talking to your employees about the downstream business impacts of cyber incidents like phishing attacks and offering tips on how best to avoid them can strengthen your resilience.

Tell employees to watch out for unexpected emails or messages, check senders’ emails, avoid clicking on suspicious links, never share passwords via email and report suspicious emails to IT.

Implement Zero-Trust Principles 

The first step in protecting your business and keeping operations up and running is to prevent cyberattacks in the first place. But businesses understand that’s not always possible, given how common and sophisticated such events, which are a when-not-if proposition, have become. 

However, you can significantly enhance your security by implementing zero-trust principles within storage systems to ensure that no one has implicit access to any part of the data. Part of a zero-trust strategy includes encrypting data end-to-end, protecting data through its lifecycle.

Embrace Modern Processes for Compliance, Efficiency and Resilience

Many businesses still rely on the IT processes they have had in place for 20 years. But modern processes now enable businesses to become extremely efficient at keeping their operations up and running. That’s even more critical now that new regulations such as DORA have emerged.

Now is the time to look at your existing processes and technologies and understand what’s working well and what needs to change. Ask yourself: Who manages that process? Is there a single decision-maker? How secure is that process to the business? What does security access control look like, and who should have that access? If there’s an attack, do you have the ability to test against the data set that’s been attacked to know where your recovery point will be?

In light of new directives, you also need to test your processes. This is critical because businesses haven’t traditionally tested their recovery capabilities and verified that their data is good after an attack, because companies typically didn’t have the time. Now, regulations require you to prove you can meet requirements by doing these fire drills at regular intervals. 

To incorporate these new practices into operations and do them quickly will require IT design change. Adopt modern IT infrastructure and processes to meet the cybersecurity and disaster recovery demands of new and existing regulations. Ensure your IT environment enables you to operate at the risk level that’s acceptable to your business. Implement an IT environment and processes that will give you the confidence that cyber incidents will have the least possible impact on your organization, while making it easy for you to access and benefit from your data and providing you with maximum performance capabilities.

Employ Digital Twin Technology for Real-Time Remediation and Resilience

When investing in IT technology that helps your business become more resilient and provides added value, explore how capabilities such as digital twins can enable you to offset that cost.

A digital twin can allow you to use an automated process to help you recover and empower you to be more preventative. You could create the twin of the minimum viable requirements for your company based on the IT infrastructure that’s running your operation. 

If you isolate that digital twin outside of the production environment, you can contend with everything that’s associated with an attack via your digital twin strategy. This will enable you to do real-time remediation and testing to ensure you’re meeting minimum viable requirements in line with regulations. Plus, if a regulator requires your business to do forensic analysis on production, you can do that while continuing your operations. 

Join Forces With a Proven Partner With Sector-Specific Expertise and Skin in the Game    

Many cybersecurity and disaster recovery suppliers give customers a piece of technology and leave it to the enterprise to do the rest. What businesses really need is a strategic partner that they can trust to provide the right advice and deliver high-performance, scalable, sustainable solutions to lower their risk and costs while positioning them to be more competitive.

Seek a trusted supplier that knows your industry, takes the time and effort to learn about your business, has the technology and expertise to deliver what you need, and guarantees predictable recovery in minutes instead of days. Work with that provider to create a business continuity plan that protects your data against cyber risk, minimizes downtime, meets workload demands every time, streamlines operations and empowers you to achieve more with less.

When the operations of your business are at risk, you can’t leave anything to chance. Make sure your cybersecurity and disaster recovery strategies include education across your enterprise, zero trust, modern IT and processes, real-time remediation and resilience for optimal business continuity, and work with a proven partner that deeply understands IT, your sector and you.