Why cyber resilience isn’t just a defence mechanism: How to create a secure foundation for innovation, too

Data helps organizations understand core business processes, enables evidence-based decision-making, and opens new pathways for efficiency and growth. Harvard Business Review contributing writer Tim Stobierski once said that although intuition is valuable for providing a hunch or spark that sets you on a particular path, only through data can you "verify, understand and quantify". It's not enough to gather and process data in isolation, though. Organizations must also understand the need to safeguard critical information and boost cyber resilience to withstand threats and pitfalls.

Gathering and processing vast quantities of data expands the attack surface. Having IT infrastructure in place that helps businesses take advantage of innovations like AI can mean exposure to a new class of threats and cyber attacks.

This is why it's essential for organizations to match investment in data management and storage systems with infrastructure and software that will offer both high levels of protection and rapid, reliable recovery.

The inevitability of big data

Data has reshaped the way businesses operate and has even changed the culture around decision-making. The London School of Business Administration has highlighted how the rise of big data and big data analytics marked the transition from primarily gut feeling-based decision making to increasingly evidence-based decision making.

"By collecting and analysing data from multiple sources—such as customer interactions, market trends, and financial performance—businesses can identify patterns and predict outcomes with greater accuracy. This helps leaders minimise risks, allocate resources effectively, and plan strategically for long-term growth," the institution wrote in a blog post.

Data can also help a business strike a healthy balance between business-as-usual continuity and the risk-taking nature of innovation – guiding how best to allocate resources and achieve ambitions. Harnessing data can promote more customer insights, including segmenting audiences and understanding behavioral patterns and preferences, all in real time. Such a wealth of information could gear a business toward being more customer-centric. Other data points, such as those gathered on supply chains or production cycles, can help businesses find efficiencies. Looking further into the future, data points can also be used to identify gaps in the market or test ideas faster – minimizing the risks of innovating.

While placing a greater emphasis on data can mean lower-risk decision-making, it can raise risk in a different area – cybersecurity. The explosive growth of data being harvested and used by organizations, and the additional information generated from decisions based on this data, inevitably increases the risk of a data breach or cyber attack. The more data there is, the greater the attack surface and, potentially, the more attractive a target it is for cyber criminals. That's why, regardless of how a business uses data, security should be designed into your storage foundations and systems.

Safeguarding data in the AI age

Safeguarding AI data without slowing innovation

The right cyber resilience strategy creates a security posture that doesn’t get in the way of innovation. For Dell, that means a PowerProtect portfolio built around three pillars: secure, detect, and recover.

Secure – reduce the attack surface with built-in protection

Reducing the attack surface is essential to giving organizations the confidence to pursue innovation at pace. Features like end-to-end visibility, immutable backup, encryption, and embedded cyber-resilience can identify and minimize vulnerabilities across on-premises and multicloud environments.

Detect – find and stop threats before they impact AI outcomes

Quickly detecting and responding to threats ensures minimal disruption to ongoing data-driven projects. Systems with managed detection and response (MDR) services can continuously monitor and probe issues, while a native threat intelligence platform can proactively detect and respond to emerging threats.

Recover – bounce back fast with trusted data

Finally, if the worst-case scenario does happen and the business suffers an attack, having a secure foundation that helps them recover as fast and effectively as possible is essential to business continuity. Dell Technologies' systems use built-in capabilities to help keep data safe by restoring servers to their last known uncompromised state, while also keeping backups out of reach from cyberattacks with anti-ransomware solutions. This is in addition to Dell's Incident Response and Recovery (IRR) services team, which offers 24/7 support to help contain, mitigate, and recover from an attack.

Lafayette Utilities Systems (LUS) is an organization that wanted to strengthen its data protection and cyber resiliency to reduce disruptions from outages and disasters while securing customer information and infrastructure data against cyber threats. The company adopted Dell's data protection portfolio, and PowerProtect Data Manager and PowerProtect Cyber Recovery in particular, to prepare for and recover from any unforeseen threats.

"Working with Dell Technologies has enabled LUS to strengthen all its systems to prepare for any unknown disasters and cyber threats the future may hold," said network engineering and operations supervisor Matthew Suire.

To learn more about how you can keep your organization's data secure without impeding on the pace of innovation, read Dell's whitepaper 'Cyber Resilience in Action'.