Per the “Global Risk Report 2022” from the World Economic Forum, the impact of disruptive cyberattacks could be financially devastating for businesses that fail to invest in protections for their digital infrastructure, particularly in a scenario in which governments begin prohibiting ransom payments or penalizing poor cybersecurity practices.
Lost in the noise about the epidemic of cybercrime, predicted to cost $6 trillion globally this year and hit $10.5 trillion annually by 2025, is this fact: Cybercriminals have become extremely sophisticated.
In some cases, they sit on a network for months, avoiding even the best tools designed to detect suspicious activity. In this way, they can compromise core applications and infrastructure (network, storage, compute) as well as backups.
What keeps IT cybersecurity leaders up at night? The prospect of an attack not just against one database or one server but targeting the organization’s entire technical infrastructure. Many companies don’t see the early warning signs of an attack and don’t detect the attack until malicious actors have unauthorized access to sensitive information or have seized control of critical data and infrastructure.
These security vulnerabilities aren’t hard to understand when you consider the hodgepodge of equipment, software, and infrastructure spread across on-premise, private and public cloud, edge and IoT. Shadow IT and applications from one’s partners and vendors further add to the risk. In one report, 94% of the surveyed global CIOs indicated that they had discovered endpoints in their organization that they were unaware of. At the same time, large organizations have difficulty remediating vulnerabilities quickly and at scale.
Although many good cloud providers have invested heavily in both security and resilience for their platforms, Weston points out that this investment represents just recovery of the platform. “If there is, in fact, an outage, they’ll provide platform recovery — recovering the platform configuration that was in place prior to the outage. “Vendors like Kyndryl that can go a step further and also provide resilience of the applications, the data, and the platform configuration have a more compelling value proposition,” Weston says.
"Vendors like Kyndryl that can go a step further and also provide resilience of the applications, the data, and the platform configuration have a more compelling value proposition."
For example, Kyndryl has invested heavily in software to address these needs. Take its Kyndryl Cloud Resiliency Orchestration, a suite of managed services that uses an orchestration platform — driven by Kyndryl Resiliency Orchestration software — bundled with its own replicator and anomaly detection. The combination provides failover automation and enables recovery within business-set recovery time objectives (RTOs).
Importantly, Kyndryl’s tool uses automation for the complex recovery of multivendor physical, virtual, and container environments wherever possible. This reduces switchover time and the potential for human error.