What happens after the attack: From cybersecurity to cyber resilience

Cybersecurity plays a critical role in preventing attacks through controls such as firewalls, endpoint protection and email security. Despite these investments, breaches still happen.  According to the World Economic Forum, 87% of respondents identified AI-related vulnerabilities as the fastest-growing cyber risk in the past year.  

When they do, the question shifts from “How do we stop this?” to “How fast can we recover and return to normal?” That’s where cyber resilience becomes essential. It focuses on withstanding disruption and restoring operations quickly and cleanly.

Cybersecurity is prevention. It detects and blocks malicious activity to keep systems and data safe. Cyber resilience assumes incidents will occur. It is the ability to anticipate, withstand, recover from and adapt to cyber disruptions so the business keeps running during and after an event. Treat them as two halves of one strategy rather than competing priorities.  

Legacy continuity tactics were built for accidental outages, but not adversaries. Redundant hardware pairs or mirrored sites help with power failures and component faults. They do not, by themselves, stop ransomware from spreading. Replication can carry an infection from the primary environment to the standby environment. A prevention-only stance or redundancy-only model is not enough in today’s landscape.  

When an attack succeeds, systems can go offline. Data may be encrypted. Critical services stall. In downtime, the limitations of a pure-prevention approach become clear: The business needs a tested path to continuity.  

Teams need to restore operations quickly and verify that the recovered environment is free of malware before it returns to production. Resilience makes this process repeatable and predictable rather than improvisational.  

Duplication does not equal recovery assurance. Replication that is unaware of malicious change can spread the blast radius. Fragmented stacks for backup, disaster recovery and security also create tool sprawl and blind spots that slows response and increases cost.  

But with consolidated protection and recovery, teams can move swiftly from detection to clean restore within one workflow.  

Speed is only meaningful if recovery is verifiably clean and aligned to business needs. To make resilience measurable and repeatable, organizations should define a concise set of recovery objectives that serve as the baseline for planning, funding and testing.  

These metrics translate business risk into operational targets and provide a clear baseline for audit and improvement: 

• Recovery time objective (RTO): Maximum acceptable time to restore operations. 

• Recovery point objective (RPO): Maximum acceptable data loss.  

• MTD Maximum tolerable downtime (MTD): Point where disruption becomes business failure.  

• MTCR Mean time to clean recovery (MTCR): Time to restore to a verified, malwarefree state. MTCR is critical for ransomware response.  

Use a business impact analysis and asset classification to set these targets. Reserve the strongest protection for the workloads that drive revenue and reputation.  

Acronis unifies endpoint security, backup, disaster recovery and endpoint management in a single platform, operating under one console and one agent. The unified approach reduces complexity for IT teams and shortens the path from incident detection to verified restoration.  

Immutable full-image and file-level backups stored in governance mode prevent attackers from deleting or altering backup data. AI-based behavioral detection counters zero-day threats by analyzing active processes and stopping malicious encryption in real time.  

When mitigation is bypassed, Acronis Disaster Recovery enables failover to the Acronis Cloud, which Acronis builds, manages and maintains. Customers control failover and failback through the console, run risk-free tests using included hot storage and validate restore points to ensure a clean state before returning to production. Usage-based compute billing activates only during failover to contain standby costs.  

A practical path for critical servers and VMs 

For businesses and VAR clients responsible for critical servers and virtual machines, focus on four steps: 

1. Classify assets by business value. Label systems as confidential, sensitive, private, or public. Tie labels to automated protection plans. Apply DR and aggressive RTO and RPO targets to the most critical workloads.  
2. Quantify risk and align investment. Use business impact analysis and annual loss expectancy to justify protection levels. Direct premium resilience capabilities to systems where downtime creates the greatest operational and financial damage.  
3. Harden backups and validate recovery. Store backups immutably, test failovers regularly, and scan restore points to avoid reinfection. Treat MTCR as a first-class metric and design procedures to reach it.  
4. Consolidate the stack. Reduce tool sprawl. A unified platform improves visibility, streamlines response and lowers total cost of ownership. 

Prevention remains fundamental, but resilience determines whether a cyber event becomes a brief inconvenience or a prolonged crisis. By integrating AI-powered defense with orchestrated, clean recovery, Acronis helps organizations protect critical servers and VMs before an attack and return them to production quickly after one. For corporate IT leaders and VARs, a unified platform replaces fragmented defenses with business continuity and control.