Accelerating Rapid Cyber Recovery with Cyber Resilient Automation Strategies

When cyber resilience fails during a major cyber incident, organizations are forced to confront a stark reality: traditional backup and recovery strategies may not serve their needs to recover fast enough to remain viable. According to Statista, the average time to recover is between 21 and 24 days. While some organizations may be able to remain afloat for this long, for others, this much downtime could be potentially fatal. 

Early cyber recovery strategies emphasized trustworthy recovery with indelible data and immutable backups (data backups that can't be changed or modified in any way). This meant that even if a malicious actor compromised the management plane of the organization’s backup and recovery solution, the backed-up data remained clean and ready to be restored. Unfortunately, this strategy did not consider the potential for these backups to have been jeopardized by attackers at their source: the fragile systems and data they were able to compromise.

While immutable backups provided the first line of defense against cyber incidents, today's evolving threat landscape demands solutions that prioritize rapid recovery of critical capabilities while also recovering their trustworthiness and usability. To truly be considered cyber resilient, organizations must ensure not only that the data they’re restoring is “clean” but that the most essential data (and the fragile systems that rely on it) can be restored as quickly as possible.

During a cyber incident, time is the ultimate enemy, and cyber recovery can consume a lot of time and resources. Because every minute spent on manual recovery processes extends organizational vulnerability, modern cyber recovery strategies focus on three critical pillars:

1. The concept of minimum viable company operations that focuses recovery effort and enables organizations to function with essential services while full recovery proceeds.

2. Secure, isolated recovery environments that provide clean environments for restoration.

3. Intelligent, automated approaches that can restore critical operations in days, not weeks.

The shift from traditional backup methods to cyber resilient recovery isn’t just an evolution in technology; it’s a fundamental reconstruction of the way that organizations prepare for and respond to cyber incidents.

Traditional backup and recovery systems operated on predictable timelines with clearly defined recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO). These metrics served organizations well for natural disasters and hardware failures, but today’s cyber incidents introduce variables that render these frameworks insufficient. They rarely account for the additional time required to recover trustworthy and usable systems nor the potential for source data to be damaged or altered.

Resilient cyber recovery extends beyond basic immutability to encompass real-time recovery capabilities within isolated recovery environments. Instead of relying solely on backup restoration into a potential compromised environment, modern approaches leverage isolated clean room concepts and separate production recovery zones. This architecture creates secure zones where recovery operations can proceed without risk of reinfection.

With a keen focus on shortening the time to trustworthy recovery after a major incident, cyber recovery also focuses not only on restoring affected systems but also on potentially rebuilding them. In some instances, rebuilding applications and databases proves faster than restoring from backups, especially when automation handles the reconstruction process. This shift requires organizations to maintain infrastructure as code definitions and automated deployment pipelines that can recreate entire environments on demand.

Recognizing that cyber recovery is both time and resource intensive, the first step in accelerating recovery comes down to understanding the concept of the minimum viable company (MVC) — your organization’s ability to operate at its most fundamental level during and after a cyber incident. MVC is about maintaining business continuity by identifying and prioritizing only the most essential operations, systems and resources necessary for survival until full recovery is possible.

This concept forces organizations to confront difficult questions about business priorities during crisis response. Not every system can be recovered simultaneously, and attempting to do so often results in slower overall recovery times and resource contention that extends outages.

Identifying minimum viable operations requires cross-functional collaboration between business leaders, IT operations and security teams. This process often proves politically challenging because it requires explicit prioritization of some business functions over others. However, organizations that complete an MVC analysis before crisis situations can focus recovery efforts on systems that enable basic business continuity.

That analysis also helps to focus on the full range of capabilities that may need to be recovered.  Upstream dependency analysis is critical. Systems that appear independent often rely on shared services, authentication platforms, or data feeds that must be functional before dependent applications can operate effectively. Mapping these dependencies requires deep technical understanding combined with business process knowledge. This helps ensure an understanding of the range of systems, infrastructure and data required to maintain or restore minimum viability.

Ultimately, the goal isn't permanent operation with reduced capabilities but rather establishing a foundation from which full recovery is possible. Minimum viable operations provide revenue generation capability, customer service functionality and essential compliance requirements while recovery teams work on less critical systems.

Organizations often discover that their minimum viable company requires fewer systems than initially expected, and this realization can drive broader discussions about system consolidation and architecture simplification that reduce overall cyber risk while improving recovery capabilities.

So, what should an effective cyber recovery environment (CRE) look like? Designed to ensure the safe recovery of critical applications following a cyber incident, a CRE uses immutable data to rebuild or restore target applications. This also includes testing or remediating these workloads along with their associated infrastructure and data as needed to then make them available to the business outside of normal operations.

In the backdrop of a CRE, “normal operations” involves critical business processes and associated elements within standard hosting environments, whether on-premises or in the cloud. These operations include backup and recovery systems and the automated tools used to build and update essential systems. To enhance cyber recovery, materials necessary for restoration are stored within a “trusted data and recovery” zone, which is physically or logically separated from normal operations. This zone maintains immutable backups and trusted datasets critical for restoration processes.

Applications, once recovered or rebuilt, are evaluated in “clean rooms.” These are isolated environments that contain and thoroughly test potentially compromised applications to ensure that restored applications are functional and secure. If these applications pass the testing and the normal operations environment is available, the applications are then hosted back in their original settings, or if necessary, moved to a 'production recovery' environment. This environment mirrors normal operations, providing a scalable solution for hosting cleaned applications until regular operations can be fully resumed.

Access to the CRE is tightly controlled to maintain security, with roles restricting access to only authenticated users and administrators can manage the CRE environments or access recovered applications. This helps maintain the usefulness, operational resilience and trust of a CRE in the face of continuing cyber threats. 

Network and access isolation provides additional benefits. By creating dedicated recovery networks that mirror production topology while maintaining complete isolation, organizations can pursue aggressive, real-world security, application and data testing against recovered applications, workloads and data without impacting other parts of the wider enterprise environment.  An appropriate CRE will also allow the organization to pro-actively stage recovery of the most critical applications in isolation before any incident has occurred, helping to speed up recover of other downstream applications if an incident occurs.

When it comes to rapid cyber recovery, automation and orchestration are key pieces of the puzzle — and ensuring that all moving pieces work together under pressure is essential. In fact, organizations that have already invested in automation for operational efficiency can extend these investments to create automated cyber recovery frameworks at marginal additional cost.

At the same time, it’s important to keep in mind that automation strategies must address the complete recovery lifecycle, from initial incident detection through full-service restoration. This includes automated discovery of upstream dependencies, which can be the most overlooked aspect of recovery planning. Applications don't function in isolation; they require specific databases, authentication services, network configurations and external integrations to operate effectively.

This implies that a lot needs to be known about critical applications and their dependencies if any automated recovery strategy is going to work. Intelligent dependency mapping is a foundational part of effective automation. Systems must understand not just which servers support an application, but which services, application programming interfaces (APIs) and data feeds those servers require. Without this understanding, recovered applications may appear functional while lacking critical capabilities.

Even with automated recovery, workflow will likely continue to need the combined efforts of multiple systems, internal teams and external providers.  Effective cyber recovery requires seamless coordination, and testing is essential to ensure this.

There are three primary types of testing used to verify that recovery workflow works as intended.

1. Tabletop exercises are the most basic, focused on walking through cyber recovery workflow to ensure all recovery steps are documented and accounted for.

2. Simulation tests go a step further, verifying that the cyber recovery environment functions as intended under controlled conditions but without impacting normal operations.

3. Full recovery tests move beyond simulations to shifting production into the cyber recovery environment and back, validating the organization's ability to handle real-world scenarios end- to-end.

Automated testing can help to validate readiness while decreasing the resources necessary to support manual testing, accelerating testing timelines while ensuring consistent, reliable results across all testing stages.

Even with highly advanced automated cyber recovery processes today, the primary decision-making is left to humans. With advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and orchestration, we can expect to see agentic AI play a larger role in autonomous cyber recovery — to the point where AI will ultimately make some decisions and act without human intervention.

While fully autonomous cyber recovery remains several years away, current automation capabilities can handle most recovery tasks while leaving critical decisions to human operators. Modern approaches to automation leverage multiple language models operating in chorus to make recovery decisions. This MRKL modular reasoning, knowledge and language (MRKL) pattern uses multiple AI models that must agree before executing automated recovery actions, providing higher confidence in autonomous decision-making while maintaining human oversight for critical choices.

The progression toward autonomy follows a predictable path: automated execution of human-defined cyber recovery workflow; automation of decision-making within that workflow; and, finally, autonomous workflow.

With this in mind, where should you start?

Whether your organization has a strong cyber recovery strategy in place or not, accelerating rapid recovery at any stage of your cyber resilience journey can be made easier and more effective  with the help of a single partner that has deep, multi-disciplinary expertise across security and cyber resilience solutions.

With expertise in MVC analysis, secure recovery vault integration, application modernization, network segmentation and automation, CDW can bring all of these components together holistically — whether you need us behind the scenes or on the front lines. As one of the largest security solution providers in the world, CDW can partner closely with your business to continuously improve your cyber resilience capabilities today and into the future with solutions tailored to your organization’s specific business needs.