How do you take an hour’s worth of viewpoints from a panel of leading experts and condense it into a 5-minute read, designed to provide actionable advice you can immediately use? That’s the challenge I posed to myself as I prepared to write this blog, so let me know if I delivered. As moderator of the panel, I will share that this group laid out sound guidance based on fresh research and 60+ combined years of data industry experience. You can listen to the full panel discussion here.

The panel: Ken Malcolmson, Chief Security Advisor at Microsoft; Tony Palmer, Principal Validation Analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG); and Dalton Hirst, Senior Sales Engineer at Commvault.

Their goal: Provide proven recommendations and guidance on how to better prepare for the next cyberattack. What immediate steps can you take to avoid disruption and chaos when it takes place? Although there was a wealth of knowledge and experience shared, here are some highlights:

Cyber recovery is not the same as disaster recovery

Tony shared ESG’s research validating that “89% of those interviewed ranked ransomware as a top 5 threat to their organization, and that the ability to recover to a clean environment is essential to cyberattack recovery – and that cyber recovery is not the same as disaster recovery, so you need an entirely new plan and process. What you did for disaster recovery will not work when a cyberattack hits.”

In a nutshell, a new approach and plan is needed if you are going to be successful at protecting your business when the next attack targets your organization.

You have to be able to trust your backups – and restore to a clean environment

Ken emphasized the importance, when it comes to recovery after a cyber incident, of knowing that you have a trusted clean environment and that you have a process in place to restore your clean data to clean infrastructure. 

Ken shared that “you must have backups, you must test your backups, and you must trust your backups.” He added, “that’s where I see the value in both Commvault Cloud and Cleanroom Recovery come into play. If I’m in a panic and trying to recover, I want to be 100% sure the data I’m recovering is trustworthy, and that’s where the Commvault piece comes in, and I want to make sure that where I’m restoring to is also trustworthy, and that’s the Commvault Cleanroom Recovery solution. That’s it.” 

Simplified protection for Microsoft 365 is essential to productivity

Microsoft 365 is central to the productivity of most organizations, and enhancing its protection is crucial. Dalton discussed the simplicity of Commvault’s M365 cyber resilience solution. With it, he shared that customers “can now go in, select the data they need to restore, and restore it as needed.” This capability is crucial for responding to user requests efficiently, particularly under the stress of potential data loss scenarios.

After the live demo, Ken added, “I love the simplicity [of the Commvault] approach. When customers are panicking and trying to recover their data [in M365], they don’t want to have to click through menus and different options … there’s my recovery point, that’s the data that’s in there, go. I love that!”

Plan, test – and when you need to recover, it’s got to be clean

As the session wrapped up, Tony provided his closing advice: “In a nutshell, cyber resilience really requires a detailed and secure cyber recovery plan, and you need to do that regular, auditable testing to ensure that you can recover quickly and more importantly, into a clean environment that’s free from infection. In our testing and our research and our analysis, Enterprise Strategy Group confirmed very clearly that Commvault Cleanroom Recovery delivers what’s needed to accomplish all this. You can literally, with a click, recover into an assured clean environment.”

Watch the webinar on-demand here, and learn more about our solutions – request a demo.