How to simplify disaster recovery: Shifting from preventative security to cyber resilience

Traditional cybersecurity operates on a simple premise: Keep cyberthreats out by building higher walls, adding more locks and deploying additional firewalls. But what happens when prevention fails? What happens when ransomware doesn't just breach your perimeter but spreads across your redundant systems, turning your backup infrastructure into a liability? 

The average ransomware claim now exceeds $1.18 million. For many organizations, that's not just a financial hit but a threat to their survival. 

White paper

A practical blueprint for cyber resilience from prevention to continuity

Most IT teams have invested heavily in redundancy: dual power supplies, high-availability hardware pairs and geographically distributed data centers. These measures work well against accidental outages and hardware failures, but modern ransomware doesn't care about your redundant architecture. In fact, it exploits it. 

When an attack spreads across your network fabric, your redundant data center doesn't provide protection but instead replicates the infection. Your carefully maintained failover systems become vectors for proliferating malware faster and further across your infrastructure. 

Add to this the operational nightmare of managing disconnected tools for backup, disaster recovery and security, and you've created what industry experts call a "Franken-stack." This patchwork of solutions destroys productivity, inflates costs and creates dangerous vulnerability blind spots that attackers can exploit. 

One of the most common reasons disaster recovery fails is infrastructure ownership. Traditional DR requires organizations to design, deploy, secure, patch, and maintain recovery environments that may sit idle for months or years. Because these systems are rarely used, they often fall behind in updates, security configurations, and operational familiarity. When a real incident occurs, teams are forced to execute complex recovery procedures on infrastructure they don’t regularly operate. 

This creates several risks: 

• Recovery environments that are unpatched or misconfigured 

• Security gaps that go unnoticed until an incident occurs 

• Manual recovery steps that depend on individual expertise 

• Increased likelihood of human error under stress 

In ransomware scenarios, these risks compound. Organizations may find themselves attempting to recover critical workloads onto infrastructure that is outdated, insecure, or already compromised. Simplifying disaster recovery management requires removing this burden entirely. 

Organizations are moving from prevention-only tactics to cyber resilience. They need to anticipate, withstand, recover from and adapt to operational disruptions. 

This isn't about giving up on security but rather acknowledging reality. Breaches will happen, so the question isn't if but when, and more importantly, how quickly can you recover to a verified, malware-free state. 

This introduces a critical metric that should be on every CISO's dashboard: mean time to clean recovery (MTCR). It's not just how fast you can restore systems, but how fast you can restore them without reintroducing the threat that took you down. 

To help businesses overcome the complex challenges of disaster recovery management, we’ve created the white paper “Beyond cybersecurity: A practical blueprint for cyber resilience to evolve from prevention to continuity.” 

Explore the white paper to:  

• Learn why traditional disaster recovery often fails against modern ransomware. 

• Discover a practical framework to transform your strategy from a prevention to resilience approach. 

• Understand key metrics like mean time to clean recovery (MTCR) for faster, safer restoration. 

• Uncover cloud-orchestrated strategies that simplify recovery and reduce operational risk. 

Disaster recovery becomes significantly simpler when organizations stop managing recovery infrastructure themselves. Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) replaces customer-managed secondary environments with cloud-based recovery infrastructure that is always available, secured by default, and maintained by the service provider. Instead of building and maintaining standby environments, organizations failover to a provider-managed cloud only when recovery is required. 

Acronis Cyber Protect delivers this model with IaaS-style failover to the Acronis Cloud. When an incident occurs, workloads can be recovered directly into Acronis-managed infrastructure, eliminating the need for customers to operate their own recovery sites. 

With this approach: 

• Recovery infrastructure is prebuilt and always ready. 

• Platform security, upgrades, and maintenance are handled by Acronis. 

• Failover does not depend on customer-managed hardware or cloud configurations. 

• Organizations focus on recovery decisions, not infrastructure operations. 

• This dramatically reduces operational complexity while improving recovery reliability. 

The shift from traditional cybersecurity to cyber resilience isn't optional but unavoidable. The organizations that thrive in an increasingly hostile threat landscape will be those that plan not just to prevent attacks but to survive them and recover quickly with business continuity intact. 

Want to dive deeper into building a practical cyber resilience strategy? Read our comprehensive white paper for a step-by-step framework to transition from prevention to business continuity. 

White paper

Beyond cybersecurity: A practical blueprint for cyber resilience