To support outstanding constituent experiences, government agencies need cyber resiliency, the capacity to bounce back quickly in the face of setbacks. Resiliency encompasses an agency’s people, processes and technology, with an underlying focus on safeguarding information related to the customer experience (CX), said Michael Carroll, Vice President of Sales — US SLED at Commvault, which helps agencies secure and recover data in the face of ransomware and other threats.
“Resiliency is not a point in time, nor is it a thing. It reaches all aspects of agency [operations]. It affects the users of an agency’s services, [and] it affects the strategy of an agency short and long term,” added David Rubal, CISSP, NREMT, Senior Technical Business Development Manager for U.S. DOD, Hybrid Cloud and Edge Computing Services of AWS, a cloud-computing provider.
And data management and protection play a role like never before.
Challenges to Resiliency
Among agencies’ foremost challenges is the sheer complexity of the technological landscape. Organizations depend on a wide array of tools to support CX, and more tools create more attack vectors. The difficulty lies in assembling those tools into something meaningful as it pertains to an enterprise security strategy, Rubal said.
The interdependence of data and applications also is a problem, along with the expanding geography of the IT ecosystem — “the concept of applications living in multiple places at once,” said Carroll. There are excellent reasons to move applications to the cloud, but often data protection strategies and postures don’t follow, “which makes it very difficult to protect, recover, restore and be resilient,” he said. “Really the biggest challenge,” Carroll continued, “is being able to have a unifying strategy across the organization [that allows you] to be cyber resilient.
A Way Forward
A cloud-based resiliency platform can ensure rapid recovery after an event, which is the hallmark of effective cyber resilience. Such an approach will leverage modern capabilities to deliver early warning, threat detection, incident readiness, rapid response and cyber recovery. Agencies can enjoy the benefits of cloud technology while maintaining their security posture — what Carroll called “modernize without sacrifice.”
A solution such as Commvault’s cloud platform also helps to overcome problematic IT fragmentation and encourages flexibility “across public cloud, across [on-premises] and SaaS applications, without having to manage or utilize multiple different tool sets,” he said.
A typical organization could have anywhere between five and seven different technologies that are used for backup, recovery and restore. A solution like Commvault’s cloud platform can consolidate those different applications, he added.
In addition, zero-trust architecture delivers rolebased access, while AI-driven, proactive threat detection ensures agencies have a means to support rapid recovery.
“Commvault and AWS are key solution partners,” said Rubal. “We’ve demonstrated the capabilities that we can jointly provide together in this cloud-forward environment, to achieve modern data management objectives and help customers get to where they need to be.”
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