The contemporary enterprise relies upon an application estate that spans both data centers and cloud locations. While cloud adoption has been a trend for years now, IT and business leaders continue to underestimate the interconnected and essential nature of on-premises and cloud-based workloads. Ensuring business resilience requires protecting both on-premises and cloud-based applications and data sets (see Figure 1).1
As a hybrid-cloud-based business grows, its application estate grows as well, which in turn expands the surface area for potential malicious attacks. Additionally, the rise of artificial intelligence is expected to increase the frequency and sophistication of cyberattacks, considering:
89% of organizations ranked ransomware as a top-five threat to the viability of the organization.2
62% of organizations agreed that cyber adversaries will gain advantages from innovation in generative AI.3
The distributed nature of applications and data, combined with the increasing risk of cyberattacks, necessitates a reframing of both approach and expectations when it comes to protection, resilience, and risk mitigation. Ultimately, we must agree that:
1. Cyber-risk to on-premises and cloud-based digital assets are top factors in determining business risk.
2. Time to recovery must be measured as the time required to get business operations back to minimal viability, not just the time to restore individual applications or data sets.
1. Source: Enterprise Strategy Group Research Report, Achieving Cyber and Data Resilience: The Intersection of Data Security Posture Management With Data Protection and Governance, September 2024.
2. Source: Enterprise Strategy Group Research Report, Ransomware Preparedness: Lighting the Way to Readiness and Mitigation, December 2023.
3. Source: Enterprise Strategy Group Research Report, Beyond the GenAI Hype: Real-world Investments, Use Cases, and Concerns, August 2023.