Cyberattacks are a certainty for any organization and government agencies are no different. Understanding that no one is truly immune to cyber risk is an important first step in a prudent cybersecurity approach. But what does your agency’s recovery success (or failure) look like after a cyber threat or natural disaster has come and gone? This fundamental element of data security is known as data resiliency, and it’s foundational to ensuring that a government agency is data ready. Are you data ready? How do you know?

The level of data resiliency that is maintained by a government agency has a lot to do with the “health” and awareness of its data. Working with clean, well-inventoried data makes for a much more seamless and streamlined data recovery process.

“Data is to a government agency as blood is to the human body,” stated Richard Breakiron, Senior Director, Strategic Initiatives – Fed, DoD and the Intelligence Community at Commvault. “How quickly an agency can recover from a cyberattack depends on reliable access to the right data, just like a human needs a reliable blood supply to recover from an injury.”

Breakiron also made it clear that not all data is created equal and knowing that greatly helps inform how IT decision makers prepare for the data recovery process. To be able to quickly prioritize the recovery of critical data first is invaluable to an IT leader to mitigate the impact of an attack, and that relies on strategic data categorization and inventories from the outset.

“Data resiliency relies on both preventative and reactive strategies, all of which need to be in place at all times for any organization and that resiliency characteristic derives from operational mission priorities. If you were to ask any IT team worth their salt, they would echo the same thing,” he noted.  At the end of the day, an agency’s success is about its ability to withstand the onslaught of cyber-attacks and live to begin operations the next day.

That said, part of making data resilient is understanding that data readiness is not just a concern for the IT team; it’s a concern that should be ingrained in an agency’s culture according to David DeVries, Senior Director, Strategic Initiatives – SLED at Commvault.

“Agency leaders in all departments must be involved with their organizational Data Strategy to make it effective at every level of the organization,” DeVries urged. “They set the importance and lead from the front. When an entire agency is on the same page about the importance of the data, why it is being collected, and the attendant data security, that creates data resiliency.”

A prime example of the importance of a solid data recovery plan and how it plays into data resiliency comes from Don Wisdom, Senior Director of Infrastructure Operations for the State of Colorado. At Commvault Go 2019, Wisdom shared a story about the attack and recovery of a major Colorado agency and the state’s response in the form of technology adoption.

“We achieved those goals [determined in our audit] and we made some commitments: standardizing our toolset with systems that would protect customer, citizen, and agency data; training our employees on those systems; testing those systems ensuring an audit DR. We got back to the basics of doing what customers believe our core value proposition should be. Now we’re protecting close to 3,000 servers and more than 18 petabytes of information across the state.”

Wisdom continued by explaining that the “moment of truth” came a few years later in the face of another attack on the Colorado Department of Transportation. “Not only did we have the right technology partners. We had the right internal team training process in place for our own staff. We had planned for this moment. We were ready and we were able to protect the state. We had a hostile threat in-house and everyone knew what to do.”

The American public depends on government agencies to remain operational, even in the wake of a cyberattack or natural disasters. Their ability to bounce back from cyber threats quickly thanks to the prioritization of data resiliency and proper data governance, and their use of enterprise level capability to effectively manage the data over hybrid environments and allows them to continue to meet their mission.

Learn about key strategies in boosting data resiliency in this whitepaper from Commvault titled Greater Ransomware Protection with Data Isolation and Air Gap Technologies.