Don Foster | Source | Global Vice President of Sales Engineering at Commvault

In 2022 CEOs, CFOs, CIOs and other C-Suite executives will begin mandating that their IT teams conduct periodic “fire drills” to test the strength, resilience, and speed of their cyber defense and disaster recovery processes and solutions. These executives might believe that their organization’s IT team has implemented a robust strategy to fend off and, if necessary, recover from ransomware and other attacks. But with the integrity of their business threatened by these attacks, these executives are following the famous old Russian proverb “trust but verify." They might “trust” that their IT Team's strategy will work, they are also “verifying” that it will work as well. Data integrity fire drills can confirm if an organization’s cyberattack defenses are robust, or discover weak-points in these defenses that cyber criminals might exploit. These drills can also verify that, if a worst case scenario occurs and data has been locked, altered, or destroyed by an attack, it can be quickly recovered from a secure backup copy -- turning what could have been a data disaster into a data speed bump.