An astonishing 394 zettabytes—394 followed by a mind-blowing 21 zeros—will fuel a colossal surge of global data projected to erupt by 2028.
It’s an eye-watering amount of data. But what happens when the worst comes your way? Your data’s accidentally deleted, damaged due to hardware failure, corrupted by malware, or lost due to formatting or system crashes? You’re going to need a hand getting your critical information back.
Bring in data recovery.
This article provides essential enterprise data recovery and cyber recovery help for when disaster strikes. Learn more about Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Disaster Recovery as a Service. Then, we’ll tell you about setting up a disaster recovery plan and how to recover from a ransomware attack.
What is Data Recovery?
Data recovery is a critical lifeline for organizations facing unexpected data loss from system failures or human error. In today’s highly data-driven world, the ability to swiftly restore vital information can mean the difference between operational continuity and costly downtime. Here’s a closer look at what data recovery entails and how it saved one organization.
Data recovery is the process of retrieving and restoring your lost, deleted, corrupted, or inaccessible data from storage devices like hard drives, servers, SSDs, USB drives, memory cards, or other media. It involves using specialized techniques or software to restore files that have been lost.
Take, for example, an incident that befell one organization. As COO of a regional healthcare provider, Mike was jolted at 10 AM when his IT director, George, reported a server crash. A hardware failure had erased 2.5 terabytes of essential data—patient records, appointment schedules, and billing details—halting clinic operations.
The IT team initiated their data recovery strategy, a methodical process to retrieve and restore the lost data. Using a secure offsite backup from the previous night, they carefully rebuilt the files, ensuring data accuracy. By 4 PM, 97% of the data was recovered, restoring their systems and patient care. The swift recovery preserved their operations and underscored the critical role of reliable backups in their disaster preparedness.
This hypothetical incident highlights the importance of a robust enterprise data recovery plan in critical situations. Understanding what data recovery entails can clarify how organizations like Mike’s navigate such crises.
For healthcare providers, such strategies are vital to maintaining trust and compliance. Mike’s experience serves as a reminder to prioritize resilient backup systems to protect critical operations.
But what happens when you’re confronting a cyberattack? Look to cyber recovery to help you regain your data when you’re facing ransomware or other types of malware.
What is Cyber Recovery?
That’s the number of data compromise victims in the first half of 2025.
This staggering number highlights the escalating threat of cyberattacks. As organizations face these malicious breaches, effective recovery becomes critical to protect operations and trust. Cyber recovery offers a targeted solution to restore systems and data securely after such incidents.
Cyber recovery is the process of restoring and securing critical data, systems, and operations after a cyberattack, such as ransomware, malware, or data breaches, with the goal of minimizing downtime, data loss, and operational disruption. Unlike traditional data recovery, which addresses accidental data loss from deletions, or hardware or system failures, cyber recovery specifically focuses on mitigating malicious threats by leveraging secure, isolated backups—often immutable or air-gapped—to restore systems to a clean, pre-attack state. It involves predefined strategies like incident response plans, data validation, and secure restoration to ensure business continuity and data integrity.
For example, a robust cyber recovery plan might include restoring data from an air-gapped backup to avoid re-infection, as seen in solutions like Rubrik Cyber Recovery. This distinguishes cyber recovery from broader disaster recovery, which covers non-malicious events like natural disasters.
Let’s look at a hypothetical security incident at an e-commerce company.
As the founder and CEO of a thriving global e-commerce business, John was blindsided during a Monday strategy meeting. His IT manager, Anna, interrupted with grim news: "We’ve been hit with ransomware." The IT team, who’d been tracking odd server activity overnight, confirmed the breach just an hour earlier.
Anna’s team assessed the damage—60% of the affected data was mission-critical: 2 terabytes of customer records, transaction histories, and inventory logs. Without it, order processing and shipping would halt, costing tens of thousands daily. The latest backup, 12 hours old, meant a 4-hour data loss due to their recovery point objective (RPO). With customers relying on them, Anna greenlit their cyber recovery plan, banking on air-gapped backups to restore operations before the fallout grew.
This crisis underscores the need for robust defenses against cyberattacks. Cyber recovery, distinct from general data restoration, equips organizations to bounce back from such threats.
John’s swift action and Anna’s expertise ensured the e-commerce business resumed operations by evening, preserving customer trust and revenue. This incident highlights the critical role of cyber recovery in defending organizations against the growing threat of cyberattacks.
While cyber recovery was key to restoring operations, the broader concept of cyber resilience encompasses not only recovery but also proactive measures to anticipate and adapt to such threats. John’s experience illustrates how a comprehensive approach can safeguard an organization in an era of escalating cyber risks.
What is cyber resilience?
Cyber resilience is an organization’s ability to anticipate, withstand, recover from, and adapt to cyber threats like ransomware, breaches, or malware, while maintaining operations and data integrity. It involves proactive defenses, rapid response, and continuous improvement to minimize disruption.
Key Components:
Anticipation: Identifying risks via threat intelligence and vulnerability assessments
Protection: Using firewalls, encryption, and multi-factor authentication to prevent attacks
Detection: Monitoring for anomalies to catch threats early
Response: Isolating systems and mitigating threats via incident response plans
Recovery: Restoring data and systems using secure backups, as part of cyber recovery
Adaptation: Updating defenses based on lessons learned
The e-commerce business’s swift recovery from a ransomware attack, restoring two terabytes of critical data, demonstrates cyber resilience in action. By combining robust backups, rapid response, and adaptive measures, it maintained customer trust and operations. This example underscores the importance of cyber resilience in navigating today’s escalating cyber threats.
What is Backup and Recovery Software?
Protecting critical data from unexpected disruptions is essential for business continuity. Backup and recovery software serves as a vital safety net, enabling your organization to protect and restore data quickly. Here is how these tools work and why they matter.
Backup and recovery software is designed to create copies of data, systems, or applications—backups—and restore them in case of data loss due to hardware failures, accidental deletions, cyberattacks, or other disruptions. The software ensures data integrity and operational continuity by securely storing data and enabling efficient recovery.
Key Functions:
Backup creates copies of files, folders, databases, operating systems, or entire systems, stored locally like external drives and NAS, or in the cloud such as OneDrive or AWS. The types of backups include:
Full Backup: Copies all data
Incremental Backup: Copies only data changed since the last backup, saving time and storage
Differential Backup: Copies data changed since the last full backup, balancing speed and ease of restoration
System Image/Bare-Metal Backup: Captures an entire system, including OS and applications, for complete restoration
Recovery restores data or systems from backups to their original or new locations, ensuring minimal downtime. Recovery can be:
File-Level: Restores specific files or folders
System-Level: Rebuilds entire systems, often using bootable media for crashed systems
Granular Recovery: Targets specific application items, like emails in Microsoft 365
Additional Features:
Scheduling: Automates backups at set intervals like daily or weekly
Encryption: Secures backups to protect sensitive data
Compression: Reduces backup size for efficient storage
Cloud Integration: Stores backups in cloud services like Google Drive or Azure for accessibility
Ransomware Protection: Uses immutable or air-gapped backups to prevent tampering as found in Rubrik Data Backup and Recovery
Anomaly Detection: Identifies threats like ransomware during recovery
From the e-commerce business that swiftly recovered 2 terabytes of customer data after a ransomware attack using air-gapped backups, to the healthcare provider that restored 2.5 terabytes of patient records after a server crash with offsite backups, these stories highlight the power of backup and recovery software.
Tools from Rubrik, with features like immutable backups and anomaly detection, enabled rapid restoration, minimizing downtime and preserving trust. By investing in strong backup solutions, your organization can confidently navigate disruptions, ensuring data integrity and operational resilience.
Recovery Time Objective and Recovery Point Objective
Minimizing downtime and data loss during disruptions is critical for your organization’s survival. Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) are key metrics that guide organizations in achieving swift and effective recovery. Understanding these concepts helps organizations tailor robust backup and recovery strategies to protect operations.
Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the maximum acceptable time a system, application, or process can be down before causing significant business harm, measuring the duration from disruption to full recovery. For example, an RTO of 2 hours means operations must resume within 2 hours.
Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is the maximum amount of data loss (in time) an organization can tolerate, reflecting the gap between the last backup and the failure point. An RPO of 15 minutes means up to 15 minutes of data could be lost, requiring frequent backups to minimize loss.
To achieve low RTO and RPO, you need solutions that streamline backup and recovery while ensuring data security. For instance, in the e-commerce ransomware attack, Anna’s team needed to restore 10 petabytes of data within a tight 12-hour RTO to avoid millions in losses. By leveraging frequent, automated backups, you can minimize data loss, aligning with a stringent RPO, even during large-scale disruptions. Rubrik Data Backup and Recovery delivers these capabilities with its simplified, automated, and secure platform, enabling you to meet aggressive RTO and RPO targets through immutable backups and orchestrated recovery.
What is DraaS?
Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) is a cloud-based approach that entrusts a third-party provider with safeguarding and restoring an organization’s critical data, applications, and IT systems during disruptions such as power outages, natural disasters, or system failures. By mirroring systems in the cloud, DRaaS ensures quick recovery with minimal downtime, aligning with an organization’s goals for RTO and RPO, unlike standard backup tools that focus solely on data storage.
With DRaaS you can replicate critical data and applications to a third-party cloud or provider’s infrastructure, recovering quickly during disruptions without the high costs of building a secondary data center. By leveraging automated orchestration, you can achieve minimal RTO and RPO, backed by service-level agreements (SLAs) that guarantee rapid restoration of your essential IT systems.
Unlike standard cloud backup services, where you share infrastructure with others and face delays due to competing for bandwidth or resources, DRaaS offers dedicated recovery capabilities. With DRaaS, your organization can restore operations in minutes, ensuring you maintain continuity and avoid prolonged downtime.
What is a Disaster Recovery Plan?
A disaster recovery plan (DRP) is an organization’s roadmap for addressing unexpected events that jeopardize IT systems, including hardware, software, networks, processes, and data. It details proactive, active, and post-incident steps to sustain and quickly restore an organization’s operations.
Disasters, in their many forms, can affect an organization’s operations:
- Natural disasters: Earthquakes, floods, tornadoes, or wildfires can severely damage facilities and IT systems.
- Technology failures: Server crashes, hardware breakdowns, or software glitches can block access to essential data.
- Cyberattacks: Ransomware, phishing, or DDoS attacks can disrupt networks and compromise data integrity.
- Human error: Accidental file deletions, input mistakes, or system mismanagement can lead to critical data loss.
- Utility disruptions: Power outages, internet failures, or water supply issues can cripple operations dependent on these services.
Goals of a Disaster Recovery Plan
To keep your organization resilient, a Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) aims to achieve several key goals. These include:
Maintaining seamless operations during disruptions.
Reducing downtime and complexity.
Safeguarding your critical data and systems.
Ensuring compliance with regulations.
Preserving trust among customers and stakeholders.
Types of Disaster Recovery Plans
Preparing for disruptions requires tailored strategies to protect your critical operations. Exploring different types of disaster recovery plans helps you choose the best approach to ensure rapid restoration and business continuity.
Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery: Your cloud disaster recovery strategy harnesses cloud platforms to securely store duplicates of your data and IT systems. With the cloud’s scalability and flexibility, you can quickly restore services, leveraging geographically diverse locations to enhance your resilience against disruptions.
Virtualized Disaster Recovery: In a virtualized disaster recovery approach, you create virtual snapshots of servers, workstations, or entire systems, ready to activate on virtual hosts. This allows you to automate and accelerate the restoration of critical operations, streamlining management and reducing costs.
Network Disaster Recovery: Your network disaster recovery plan prioritizes restoring connectivity after a disruption. By reconfiguring routers, switches, firewalls, and data links, you ensure seamless communication between users, cloud services, and remote locations is restored promptly.
Data Center Disaster Recovery: Focused on your data center infrastructure, this plan outlines steps to restart operations after an incident. You implement measures like redundant hardware, backup power sources, and emergency cooling to ensure your data center resumes functioning with minimal delay.
Testing Your Disaster Recovery Plan
To ensure your disaster recovery plan is effective, you must test it thoroughly to identify gaps and confirm its reliability. Here are five distinct methods to evaluate your plan:
Document Review: You and your team review the disaster recovery documentation, ensuring all backup procedures and protocols are clear and up-to-date.
Step-by-Step Rehearsal: Your team walks through each action required during a disruption, such as a data breach, to verify preparedness and clarify roles.
Scenario Simulation: You simulate a disruption on test servers to assess your team’s response, measuring the time needed to restore services.
Backup System Testing: You run tests on backup servers to mimic a failure, validating the fix before applying it to live production systems.
Full Failover Drill: You switch operations to backup systems as if a real attack or failure occurred, ensuring seamless recovery and minimal downtime.
Rubrik offers products that help you implement a strong DRP. Rubrik Cyber Recovery is a solution that protects against cyberattacks by isolating critical data and making it easily recoverable after a breach. Rubrik Data Backup and Recovery provides simplified, automatic, and secure backup capabilities, optimizing RTO and RPO. Our solutions are designed to integrate seamlessly with your existing IT infrastructures, providing ease of use and effective disaster recovery.
What is mass recovery?
Mass recovery refers to the large-scale restoration of data, systems, or infrastructure across an organization or multiple entities after a significant disruption, such as a widespread cyberattack, natural disaster, or systemic failure.
Unlike standard data recovery, which may target specific files or systems, mass recovery involves coordinated efforts to restore vast amounts of critical data, applications, and services across numerous servers, endpoints, or even entire regions to ensure business continuity.
Some of the key characteristics of mass recovery include:
Scale: Involves recovering large volumes of data such as in petabytes or multiple systems simultaneously, often across distributed environments like on-premises, cloud, or hybrid.
Coordination: Requires orchestrated processes, often involving automated tools, incident response teams, and predefined recovery plans to manage complexity.
Scope: Addresses enterprise-wide or multi-organization impacts, such as restoring operations after a ransomware attack affecting thousands of endpoints or a regional disaster impacting multiple data centers.
Tools and Techniques: Leverages advanced backup and recovery software, cloud-based DRaaS, immutable backups, and orchestration platforms to streamline recovery and meet Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO).
Here's a hypothetical example of mass recovery in action. As the founder and CEO of our thriving e-commerce business, John was in a strategy meeting when his IT manager Anna delivered devastating news: a ransomware attack had swept through their global operations overnight. The IT team, monitoring unusual server activity, confirmed the breach had encrypted 10 petabytes of mission-critical data—customer records, transaction histories, inventory logs, and payment systems—across 50 regional data centers and cloud environments, halting order processing worldwide and risking millions in daily revenue.
Anna’s team launched a mass recovery effort, a large-scale process to restore vast amounts of data and systems across the enterprise. Using Rubrik Security Cloud’s orchestration and immutable, air-gapped backups, they prioritized recovery of critical applications, restoring 95% of the 10 petabytes within 12 hours to meet a tight RTO. Anomaly detection tools identified clean recovery points, ensuring no ransomware lingered. By the next morning, global operations resumed, preserving customer trust and minimizing financial loss, demonstrating the power of mass recovery in tackling enterprise-wide disruptions.
Ransomware Recovery
Ransomware attacks are surging, growing more complex, frequent, and challenging to detect and recover from. These cyberattacks bring severe financial impacts, disrupting operations, demanding expensive recovery efforts, risking sensitive data loss, harming your reputation, and triggering legal consequences. With immutability as a cornerstone of security, your ability to rapidly restore data and maintain business continuity is crucial to counter these escalating threats and minimize losses.
To ensure your organization can withstand cyber threats like ransomware, proactive preparation is essential. Evaluating your disaster recovery strategy through targeted questions reveals gaps and strengthens resilience. Here are key questions to assess your readiness for a ransomware attack.
How long can your operations endure downtime following a ransomware attack?
Are your backup files immediately available and protected from tampering?
Do you regularly review and update your backup data and recovery processes?
What steps will you take to recover systems and data after a ransomware incident?
Recovering encrypted files after a ransomware attack poses a major challenge for your organization, often requiring cumbersome, multi-step restoration processes that are slow and prone to mistakes. Sophisticated ransomware can corrupt or delete your backups, underscoring the need for tamper-proof, immutable backups to ensure reliable recovery.
To restore your systems—whether fully or partially—you should be able to quickly access and recover your data from the latest clean version within minutes. Preparing for cyberattacks means adopting a recovery solution that rapidly detects threats, evaluates damage, and enables instant restoration using secure, unalterable backups, like those offered by Rubrik Data Backup and Recovery.
Six Steps to Cyber Resilience
To bolster your organization’s cyber resilience, you can follow these six key steps to prepare for and recover from cyber threats like ransomware. These steps ensure your organization remains operational and secure, even in the face of sophisticated attacks. Here’s how you can build a robust defense strategy.
Assess Weaknesses: Examine your infrastructure to pinpoint vulnerabilities, map data storage locations, and evaluate how accessible your data is to potential threats.
Set Recovery Goals: Establish your Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) to align recovery efforts with your organization’s needs.
Create a Strategy: Develop a detailed backup and recovery plan, outlining specific actions and assigning clear roles to your team members.
Adopt Protective Tools: Invest in solutions like cloud-based data management platforms, such as Rubrik Data Backup and Recovery, to streamline recovery and cut costs during a cyberattack.
Review Recovery Features: Focus on ransomware recovery capabilities, including rapid file restoration, immediate data access, and tamper-proof backups, to maintain seamless operations.
Conduct Regular Tests: Continuously test and refine your data restoration processes to ensure readiness for an actual cyber incident.
With global data projected to hit 394 zettabytes by 2028, the stakes for protecting your organization from disruptions have never been higher, as seen in the healthcare provider’s recovery of 2.5 terabytes after a server crash and the e-commerce firm’s restoration of 10 petabytes post-ransomware attack. These cases highlight the necessity of robust strategies to achieve low RTO and RPO, ensuring minimal downtime and data loss.
By embracing cyber resilience, you can safeguard operations against escalating threats. Comprehensive disaster recovery plans, including DRaaS and mass recovery, enable you to maintain continuity and trust. Don’t wait for a crisis to expose vulnerabilities in your systems. Act now and contact us to implement our data backup and recovery solutions and fortify your organization against future disruptions.