Arcserve Southern Africa reveals lack of enterprise executive buy-in for data resilience

Byron Horn-Botha, business unit head, Arcserve Southern Africa.

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The Arcserve 2024 State of Data Resilience in the Enterprise report reveals that with few exceptions, data resilience and continuity is crucial to the very survival of most organisations today, and yet it appears executive buy-in is still lagging in many organisations. Many organisations still focus on front-end data protection while not seeing backups as a crucial role in their cyber security strategy. This is according to Arcserve Southern Africa, the sole sub-Saharan Africa representative of US global corporation, Arcserve, which positions itself as the world's most experienced provider of backup, recovery and immutable storage solutions.

With the explosive growth and proliferation of AI-powered tools, the risk of suffering a ransomware attack or a data breach continues to increase as cyber criminals find new ways to overcome companies’ frontline cyber defences. In the USA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) recently warned about the increasing threat of cyber criminals leveraging artificial intelligence to increase “cyber attack speed, scale and automation".

More and more businesses are embarking on their own AI initiatives – such projects almost always require massive amounts of proprietary data and come to a standstill if that data is lost or stolen. However, once model training finishes, the training data must still be preserved for governance and compliance purposes, eg, to support an anti-bias audit of model predictions. Meanwhile, all the “legacy” risks to data remain, including malicious actors (especially in a world of remote working), accidental user error, natural disasters and so on. The Arcserve report notes 97% of survey respondents agree that their proprietary data is “moderately" or “extremely” critical to their company’s success, with 69% of respondents noting their organisation’s business operations would come to a halt if it lost access to its data.

Byron Horn-Botha, Arcserve Southern Africa Business Unit Head, says Arcserve commissioned the study of senior IT professionals directly involved with data backup and security to better understand how small and medium-sized businesses deal with these evolving challenges. “This is a useful and interesting perspective of companies’ data protection challenges and how they react to them. The objective is to share the results industry-wide in the hope they will help inform business execs on how to assess their organisation's data resilience strategy and uncover potential gaps,” says Horn-Botha.

Implementing the best data protection and cyber security practices with effective technologies requires IT and other investments. Buy-in from the leaders who hold an organisation’s purse strings is indispensable. Too often, though, the need and urgency isn’t communicated to these decision-makers in a way that they understand the criticality and thus put it onto the back burner.

“Too many business leaders appear to still not prioritise data resilience – the survey’s anecdotal evidence supports this finding. In conversations with small and medium-sized companies, phrases such as 'we're too small to get hit' were apparently repeatedly used. The harsh reality is that they're not too small – no business is. Arcserve notes that when these smaller entities 'get hit', they're probably too small to make the news and the corollary is that the impact may mean the end of said business,” says Horn-Botha.

A successful data resilience initiative starts at the top, with buy-in from business leaders and the board of directors. But, like any change initiative, it needs support and cultural buy-in from the entire business. It also requires alignment and commitment from partners and service providers. “Twenty-five percent or more of all survey respondents couldn’t say that their company’s leaders worry about taking proper care of the organisation’s data, and yet 69% of them noted the company’s business operations would come to a halt if it lost access to its proprietary data. The findings of this survey will be of great interest to SA executives trying to navigate the cyber threat landscape in which we are operating, whether you are small, large or an enterprise level – all data is crucial and should be treated in the same vein. At the end of the day, you have to ask, how will my business operate should the data be lost,” concludes Horn-Botha.