TechFire goes beyond backups to discuss cyber resilience
In a recent TechFire discussion hosted by TechCentral.ie in partnership with IBM and DNA IT Solutions, industry leaders explored how organisations must evolve their approach to cyber resilience in an increasingly hostile threat landscape. The conversation revealed a fundamental shift from prevention-focused strategies to assuming breach scenarios and designing systems that limit damage and enable rapid recovery.
Bill Unsworth, director of cloud for UK and Ireland at IBM, emphasised the changing mindset required in today’s environment. “We’ve shifted from preventing every breach to limiting that blast radius and recovering fast,” he explained.
Recent high-profile incidents underscore this reality. Marks & Spencer suffered a ransomware attack in April 2025 that shut down online ordering and contactless payments, resulting in £300 million in lost revenue. Similarly, Jaguar Land Rover experienced a five-week ransomware shutdown costing £50 million weekly.
Unsworth noted that modern resilience strategies must include immutable data storage, context-based access restrictions, and isolated recovery environments. These measures ensure that even if primary systems are compromised, organizations maintain clean recovery points that cannot be tampered with by attackers.
Traditional disaster recovery plans, once focused on hardware failures and stored in drawers, are now obsolete. Modern threats are primarily logical in nature – malware, misconfigurations, and insider actions. Organizations need continuously validated backups and regularly tested recovery procedures that account for compromised systems and credentials. The static runbook approach simply doesn’t address today’s dynamic threat environment.
Regulatory frameworks like DORA and NIS2 are driving organisational change, particularly in critical sectors. These regulations mandate operational resilience testing, third-party risk management, and incident reporting within tight timeframes. While compliance can be challenging, it’s pushing organizations toward more robust security postures and resilience capabilities.
Declan Hussey, CEO of DNA IT Solutions, highlighted the practical realities of implementing modern resilience architectures. “The depth of tech stack that’s there now today is significant, it’s complex. So my advice is very simple, treat it like a team sport. Take the help that’s out there,” he advised. DNA IT Solutions has helped organizations extend their architectures across multiple cloud environments with recovery point objectives down to minutes or even seconds, a dramatic improvement from legacy approaches.
Robert Kelly, CEO of Heart Rhythm International, shared his organisation’s journey toward improved resilience. “One of the biggest improvements we’ve made in HR’s resilience strategy is moving to infrastructure as code using Terraform,” he noted. This approach enables rapid, predictable infrastructure rebuilding and ensures disaster recovery environments match production configurations, reducing human error and accelerating recovery times.
The consensus among panelists was clear: organisations must design for resilience from the ground up, leverage managed services when lacking in-house expertise, and recognise that cyber resilience is no longer optional – it’s a business imperative in an era where breaches are inevitable.
AI was used in the writing of this article
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