Page 35 - EngineerIT August-September 2025

DATA SECURITY

Developing true cloud resilience by

moving beyond data backup to full

ecosystem restoration

n today’s cloud environments, Impacting business continuity You simply point the system to the cloud
resilience goes beyond data backup. Without recovering the full account, and it maps out every resource,
IFocusing solely on data protection, configuration stack, rebuilding every dependency, every configuration.
without understanding the full services becomes a manual, time- From there, it creates a snapshot aligned
infrastructure and configuration, can consuming process. That delay to your backup policies, enabling
lead to prolonged downtime and costly directly impacts business continuity, complete point-in-time recovery.
recovery efforts. extending downtime and eroding
customer trust. This is called a “time machine” and
Cloud-native applications are built from gives customers the ability to rewind
a web of interconnected components, But it is not just about speed. Partial and recover individual cloud resources
including Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs), recoveries often miss critical policies or entire environments in minutes. No
Kubernetes clusters, container registries, and access controls, opening the door more waiting hours or days to reconfigure
Identity and Access Management (IAM) to unauthorised access or introducing services before recovery can even begin.
policies and more. These elements new security gaps. Dependencies, Instead, the system discovers, protects,
are deeply interdependent, meaning scaling rules and integrations rewinds, and restores everything, securely
a failure in one can ripple across the must also be restored correctly; and swiftly.
entire system. With so many dynamic otherwise, applications may behave
and complex moving parts, resilience unpredictably or fail altogether. The real value lies in the simplicity
is not just about backing up individual and completeness of the experience.
files or virtual machines. Traditional backup systems have Customers can select policies from
long focused on the basics, such as prebuilt templates to recreate their cloud
True resilience demands protecting virtual machines, databases, and flat application environments with precision.
and recovering the entire application files, leaving the broader application They are not just recovering data; they are
ecosystem, not just isolated pieces. environment exposed. This often restoring business continuity, preserving
Every component must be accounted results in fragmented recoveries, security posture, and eliminating the
for, so the system can be restored where the data may be restored, risk of misconfigured services or missing
seamlessly, in any region, at any time. but the infrastructure, configurations access controls. In essence, this is not just
In the current climate of distributed and dependencies are missing. The backup; it is resilience, redefined.
cloud environments, partial protection is outcome is predictable: unstable
simply not enough. applications, prolonged downtime, Essential but not sufficient
and a scramble to manually rebuild Traditional backups are essential, but they
Restoring only the data, without what should have been recovered in are not enough. Customers often assume
the supporting infrastructure like one seamless motion. that having a data backup means they
networking configurations, IAM roles, are covered. But what if the entire cloud
or Kubernetes manifests, results in an Taking a different approach environment is compromised? In that
incomplete recovery. The application Modern cloud-native backup worst-case scenario, simply backing up
may come back online, but it will technologies offer a fundamentally data will not restore full functionality. That
be unstable, misconfigured and different approach. They allow is when the limitations of conventional
vulnerable. organisations to protect and recover tools become clear.
entire application environments, not
just the data, using intelligent data Organisations need advanced data
lifecycle management and cloud- management solutions that go beyond
native services. These solutions basic recovery. Solutions that can
automatically discover all cloud discover, protect, rewind and restore entire
resources within a customer’s application environments (containers,
account. configurations, and dependencies) in
minutes. It is not just about having a
By Aslam Tajbhai, Head of Solutions at Data Management backup; it is about being able to bounce
Professionals South Africa back, fully, and fast.

35 | EngineerIT August/September 2025