ITWeb, in partnership with Veeam, is running a survey on data resilience readiness among businesses in Africa. The survey aims to explore just how prepared these businesses are to recover from a ransomware or cyber attack, as well as the resources they have at their disposal to help them recover.

Brendan Widlake, the Regional Director for Africa at Veeam, says, “Data is at the heart of businesses. It's the most important asset.

“However, the amount of data has absolutely exploded over the past few years. Data touches every aspect of operations, the customer database, internal systems and pricing models, and it is key to helping your team service your customers, or your product management teams to develop the next generation of products. Data volumes are growing because we have more tools available to us to generate it, cloud computing has enabled us to store data in multiple locations and process data and retrieve results in multiple locations, and AI has accelerated the growth and output of data for businesses.

“This explosion of data means there is more data to protect, across more disparate systems and in multiple locations and geographies. Protecting and managing this data is harder now than ever before, particularly when using the point solutions traditionally used for specific environments.”

He goes on to add, “Unfortunately, Africa is probably one of the hardest hit continents when it comes to cyber security attacks and ransomware attacks. There's not a day that goes by that we don't hear of a customer being targeted.

“Backup is essentially your last line of defence. Organisations need to be able to do a restore and get back up and running quickly, so there's a huge focus on modernising backups with a modern data management and data protection portfolio such as Veeam’s.”

In addition to data security, data portability is also a key factor in data resilience.

Ian Engelbrecht, Systems Engineering Manager for Africa at Veeam, explains, “We take a different view of resilience. Data resilience is an evolution of security and continuity. Traditional cyber security plans are not able to keep up with the proliferation of new threats. To Veeam, resilience means that regardless of what happens, you have the ability to recover or be able to bring your environment up anywhere. If you try to recover to your DR data centre, but it's also been compromised, you need to be able to go somewhere else, with your data intact, secure and available. This is where data mobility comes into play.”

Complete the survey and stand a chance to win

To establish where they are in their data resilience journey, the survey asks respondent businesses whether they stay informed about the latest cyber threats and attack techniques, including those relevant to their backup and infrastructure systems, and if they conduct regular security assessments on their backup infrastructure to detect vulnerabilities and potential threats.

Other questions asked in the survey include:

Does your organisation use backup data as an additional layer of defence to scan for indicators of compromise (IOCs), malware, or other threats?
Assuming a worst-case scenario where all systems are affected, how long would it take your organisation to restore full operations?
To what extent has your organisation integrated AI intelligence into its data protection strategies?

We hope you’ll be able set aside a few minutes of your time to participate in the survey, and stand a chance to win an Amazon voucher to the value of R5 000. The detailed results of the survey, and the prize winner, will be published on ITWeb.

To play your role in compiling this data resilience readiness trends report, click on this link.

Polling the extent of African businesses’ data resilience readiness