Backup and Recovery Strategies in Modern Enterprise IT Systems

Abstract

Assessing the current state of enterprise backup and recovery strategies is critical to ensuring that an organization’s digital assets are safeguarded against a variety of internal and external threats: hardware and system failures, human errors, malicious cyberattacks such as ransomware, etc. This paper examines the evolution of data protection from traditional, reactive approaches to comprehensive, proactive resilience frameworks. The paper provides a breakdown between the foundational data protection strategies of on-premise, cloud and hybrid methods of data protection and restoration with explanations of the pros and cons of each method from the perspectives of control, scalability and disaster recovery. The analysis extends to advanced methodologies such as Disaster Recovery as a Service, Continuous Data Protection for recovery at the most granular level, and to the importance of immutable storage to avoid data alteration. Paper analyses today's challenges of voracious data growth, new types of data residing in increasingly fragmented environments, and the ever-evolving sophistication of malicious actors especially as it relates to ransomware targeting backup infrastructure. It also explores the use of emerging technologies, especially Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to conduct predictive analytics, detection of anomalies, and the automation of recovery with architectures such as air-gapped and chain-free backups to provide greater levels of isolation. Finally, the impact of global regulatory compliance standards (GDPR, HIPAA) on modern-day data protection is discussed and relevant industry standards (NIST, ISO 27001) that have become best practices are reviewed. JEL: L86, M15