80% of companies never recover after a cyberattack. How can you make sure yours is among the other 20%?

At the Infosek conference, Smartis expert Iztok Sitar, a data center solutions consultant with over 16 years of experience in storage and data protection, highlighted the last line of defense in cybersecurity: safeguarding and restoring data with IBM Storage Defender. He emphasized that resilience against cyber threats is a team sport.

IBM Storage Defender strengthens business resilience through connected and coordinated action across all layers — from primary storage to the final backup copies stored on isolated devices and media. Let’s take a look at how a comprehensive defense automates threat detection and enables fast response and reliable recovery after an attack.

Resilience is not about a single tool

Protecting data is like playing a team sport. Attackers will test your defense from every angle — left, right, above, and below. If the team isn’t connected, it falls apart. If it plays in sync, it wins. IBM Storage Defender helps companies achieve just that: building a system that bounces back after every attack.

Today, security can no longer be guaranteed by a single solution. What’s needed is coordinated, connected action across multiple technologies and approaches, working together as a strong defense.

Too often, companies invest in security only to comply with regulations. But as Sitar noted, this is like having a law that forces you to lock your front door at home. In reality, we lock our doors to protect our family and belongings — not to avoid fines. The same principle applies to data protection: the real reason is to safeguard business continuity and customer trust.

Yet the numbers paint a worrying picture:

• 1 in 14 backups is unusable in practice,
• in the event of a cyberattack, the chance of a failed recovery is 10x higher than in normal operations,
• less than 1% of all backups are actually tested, meaning the average company thoroughly tests just two copies per year,
• more than 80% of organizations cannot effectively return to normal business after a major attack.

These figures make one thing clear: recovery is often the weakest link — and it’s here that survival is decided.

Why a holistic approach is the only real protection

IBM Storage Defender is not a single product, but a suite of integrated solutions. Companies can deploy it step by step, choosing which components to include first. It’s a flexible system that connects primary data storage, backups across multiple locations, isolated environments, and advanced anomaly detection tools.

Key capabilities include:

• Integration with primary systems – protection starts at the storage level,
• Fast, reliable recovery – downtime measured in weeks or months is no longer acceptable,
• Early threat detection – the sooner anomalies are spotted, the fewer data need restoring,
• Automated backup validation – increasing the likelihood that copies are usable when they’re most needed.

Five steps to stronger resilience

A comprehensive approach to data protection rests on five key elements that enable fast recovery after an attack:

1. Basic protection – data must be stored in at least two locations, with backups tailored to data criticality. For added security, tapes can be physically removed to a third site.
2. Immutability and isolation – every backup must be immutable and isolated from production, ensuring it’s inaccessible to attackers.
3. Isolated “clean room” environment – a test environment where backups can be restored and checked for malware. Studies show over 80% of companies already have malicious code hidden in their backups.
4. Threat detection at every layer – from primary storage (block and file level) to snapshots and backups. IBM Storage Defender combines multiple tools, improving the chances of detecting attacks.
5. Automation – manual verification of backups is too time-consuming. Automation ensures a continuously updated list of “known good copies,” so companies always know which backups are safe to restore from.

Sensors and anomaly detection

IBM Storage Defender employs multiple layers of protection. On production systems, sensors monitor activity at the file system level and even at the storage device itself, checking every write operation for anomalies. Additional tools monitor snapshots and backups.

All findings are consolidated in the central Defender Data Resiliency Service, which provides visibility, reporting, and compliance evidence. This gives organizations a complete overview of backup health, along with audit-ready proof for regulators.

Fast recovery as a competitive advantage

In modern business, recovery speed is critical. IBM Storage Defender Data Protect enables instant mass restore of thousands of virtual servers in under an hour. Systems become available quickly, and full restoration is completed within a few hours.

The solution is built on modern architecture designed for performance, throughput, and scalability. It also incorporates deduplication, compression, erasure coding, and incremental copies that appear as full backups, dramatically simplifying operations.

Thanks to built-in data search capabilities, the solution can also support advanced scenarios, such as powering language models for internal search and analytics.

Integration and coordination are the keys to success

As Sitar concluded, the entire system must be connected — from primary storage and metadata to backups and isolated environments. Only then can organizations detect anomalies in time, prevent attacks from spreading, and, if the worst happens, quickly restore operations.

In the cyber landscape, attacks are not a question of if, but when. That’s why resilience is a team effort — and with IBM Storage Defender, companies can play that game more confidently and effectively.

More than 80% of companies fail to effectively return to normal operations after a cyberattack. IBM Storage Defender helps businesses be among the remaining 20%. By connecting different layers of protection, automating backup validation, and detecting anomalies quickly, it ensures systems can be restored in hours instead of weeks.