Cyberattacks are a key concern of nearly every organization worldwide and have the attention of top organizational leaders. No company is immune to attack, regardless of geographic location, size or industry. Cybercrime is highly profitable and, therefore, unlikely to go away anytime soon. IDC research shows that data security, risk and compliance are the top priorities for enterprise investment, even in the face of macroeconomic headwinds (source: IDC's Future Enterprise Resiliency and Spending Survey, Wave 1, February 2023). Even factoring in inflation and higher interest rates, spending on cyber preparedness continues apace.

Threat actors have learned to attack the backup first because if they can eliminate the ability to restore data, the odds of the victim paying a ransom increase.

Because of pervasive cyberattacks, organizations focus on becoming cyber-resilient. Cyber-resilience goes beyond simply being able to recover after an attack, which is reactive in nature. It includes a proactive approach to cyber defense by actively defending against attacks and limiting or preventing damage or loss of critical data. Active defense involves considering cyber defense at every layer of the data management stack and infrastructure, including authentication, data access, role-based access control, application, network, storage and data protection systems.

It also means adopting technologies that can help organizations better manage data protection and recovery operations and leverage new tools to assess risk, classify sensitive data for security measures and surface threats earlier in both production and backup storage environments.