The missing piece of the CIA triad: Why ‘availability’ matters

We are often obsessed with who can see our data (Confidentiality) and how that data is protected from tampering (Integrity). While these are vital, there is a third pillar of the CIA triad that is currently under constant pressure: Availability.

A recent Forrester survey revealed a startling reality: 76% of data breaches now affect availability, while only 42% impact confidentiality and 27% affect integrity. Despite being the most frequently targeted element of the CIA triad, availability remains the most overlooked. In an era where 70% of the global population is connected to the internet, uptime isn't just a metric; it’s the lifeblood of modern business.

Every second of downtime is a high stakes race. Research from Oxford Economics and TechTarget confirms this staggering cost, which quickly escalates for high-risk sectors like finance, health care and manufacturing. According to ITIC’s 2024 report, 97% of large enterprises lose over $100,000 per hour during an outage, and 41% report losses between $1 million and $5 million per hour. The impact isn't just financial; it’s reputational:

• 74% of consumers prioritize website reliability above almost all else
• 64% of users lose trust in a brand immediately after a site crash.
• 53% of total downtime costs are attributed directly to lost revenue.

Why is availability the "overlooked leg" of the triad? Many executives undervalue it until a crisis hits. Beyond simple hardware failure, modern cyber resilience is threatened by:

• Ransomware: The ultimate availability killer that locks users out of their own data.
• DDoS attacks: Flooding infrastructure to make services unreachable.
• Misconfigurations: Cloud based errors that lead to cascading outages.
• Shadow IT operations: Unmanaged applications and devices that bypass security protocols and create hidden vulnerabilities.

Protecting data availability happens almost all the time in ways we rarely notice. Whether it’s your Gmail, your banking app or the flight tickets you book, that data is almost always replicated and cached across several global servers. Large SaaS corporations with massive backbone networks use a multitude of techniques to keep downtime at zero and ensure data availability.

For businesses with critical data, it is vital to employ similar methods. One cornerstone is immutable backups, not just a regular backup, but one that cannot be encrypted or deleted by ransomware. When measuring resilience, organizations often look at the mean time to recovery (MTTR), aiming to minimize the gap between failure and restoration. However, in this age of sophisticated malware, the industry is shifting focus toward mean time to clean recovery (MTCR). It isn't enough to just get the systems back online quickly; you must ensure they are restored to a "clean" state to avoid immediate reinfection.

For critical systems, active device replication like an HA (high availability) pair and failover can provide "hot" disaster recovery, though it can be expensive. This is where cloud-based disaster recovery comes in; it can achieve near zero recovery times for a fraction of the cost of physical redundancy. Not every application needs this level of availability, so businesses should perform asset classification and labelling to focus these advanced resources on their most critical systems.

Acronis Cyber Protect provides natively integrated cyber protection to help businesses achieve end-to-end cyber resilience. Rather than just reacting to an attack, the platform actively prevents downtime through:

• Best-in-industry recovery time objectives (RTOs): Using Acronis Instant Restore, you can start a backup as a Windows or Linux virtual machine directly from storage in mere seconds.
• Continuous data protection: Acronis monitors changes in critical applications, ensuring that even work performed between scheduled backups is never lost.
• Safe recovery: To ensure a clean recovery, Acronis integrates anti-malware updates and scans into the restoration process, removing detected malware before it reaches production.
• Universal restore: This technology enables quick system recovery to dissimilar hardware, including bare metal physical, virtual or cloud environments.
• Automated fail-safe patching: To prevent updates from causing downtime, Acronis automatically backs up endpoints before installing patches, allowing for an immediate rollback if a patch fails.

By leveraging a single agent and a unified management console, organizations can achieve a higher level of autonomy and protection across over 30 workload types.

To ensure your organization treats availability with the priority it deserves, consider these steps:

1. Map your systems: Categorize your data to identify where availability is most critical.
2. Audit your RTO: If your current recovery plan takes days, evaluate solutions that offer best in industry recovery times.
3. Run DR drills: Disaster recovery is like a muscle; if you don't flex it with regular drills, it won't work when you need it.
4. Invest in redundancy: Use flexible storage options including local, network and cloud to ensure your backups are always accessible.

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