The modern business landscape is thrilling yet daunting. Rapidly evolving technology, persistent cyberthreats and escalating operational complexities make data protection and seamless business continuity challenging for businesses of all sizes. Your organization needs robust security measures that go beyond traditional backup solutions to address the intricacies of today's complex IT ecosystems.

To ensure comprehensive security and smooth operation of critical business processes, your organization needs more than periodic backups — it requires a comprehensive, proactive approach that integrates advanced backup strategies, disaster recovery (DR) capabilities and state-of-the-art ransomware protection.

In this article, we'll examine the current cyberthreat landscape, how it is evolving and how you can prepare your organization to overcome unprecedented challenges in 2025 and beyond.

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The 2024 threat landscape: Key takeaways

As 2024 draws to a close, let's take a look at how threat actors have evolved their tactics, lessons learned and how you can better protect your business and data in 2025.

Shifts in attack strategies

The cybersecurity landscape in 2024 has been remarkably dramatic, demonstrating a significant increase in aggressiveness and sophistication among threat actors. Ransomware attacks are the most common type and have the greatest impact, with nearly 50% of businesses experiencing one, according to the Kaseya Cybersecurity Survey Report 2024.¹

Cybercriminals are constantly adapting and evolving. This year, attackers have shifted their strategies, focusing on extracting data, such as credentials, session cookies and digital identity. They now employ user-based attacks, such as session hijacking, for initial access, bypassing multifactor authentication (MFA) and leveraging social engineering methods, such as ClickFix, to deliver infostealing malware to infiltrate systems.

Complex IT infrastructures

Hybrid and multicloud environments have become a popular choice among businesses looking to navigate the constantly changing business environment. However, increasing reliance on modern, interconnected IT infrastructures and diverse systems adds to complexity, making data protection across all platforms more difficult.

Ensuring seamless security in such complex environments is challenging due to differences in security protocols, inconsistent policy enforcement and gaps in integration between on-premises systems, public clouds and private clouds. These silos create vulnerabilities that cybercriminals easily exploit, especially in organizations with limited visibility into their entire IT ecosystem.

Tight RTOs and RPOs

In a recent survey, 41% of respondents revealed it would take days or longer to recover critical applications, if they could recover at all.

Disruptive incidents, whether natural disasters, human errors or cyberattacks, are bound to happen, and they often occur when you least expect them. When such incidents do occur, slow recovery times or significant data loss can result in costly consequences, including lost productivity and regulatory penalties. Meeting tight recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) is critical for maintaining business continuity. However, achieving these stringent goals can be a daunting task with legacy or outdated backup solutions.

Traditional backup methods often lack the speed, scalability and integration capabilities required to handle the complex demands of modern IT environments. Your organization must transition to advanced backup and disaster recovery solutions that prioritize automation, resilience and security to meet even aggressive RTO and RPO goals. Features like automated backups, advanced recovery options, disaster recovery testing and real-time data replication are critical for minimizing downtime and ensuring seamless recovery.

Why businesses need a new approach to business continuity and disaster recovery

With the threat landscape changing rapidly and business operations becoming more digitized, traditional business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) methods are no longer enough. Your organization must implement proactive strategies and robust BCDR solutions to effectively tackle the challenges of today's dynamic environment.

From reactive to proactive

Routine backups can help protect your data to a certain extent. However, you must adopt a proactive approach to BCDR to safeguard your data effectively and ensure your business never stops. Besides developing a comprehensive business continuity plan, you must also invest in reliable solutions to build resilience against evolving threats, such as ransomware attacks.

Look for a backup and disaster recovery solution that integrates automation and intelligence. Automated backup and recovery processes enhance efficiency and reduce the chance of errors, while intelligent systems can identify vulnerabilities, predict potential failures and take preemptive actions to avoid disasters. Having a security-first mindset is critical when developing a BCDR strategy to make sure data is protected both in transit and at rest. By weaving these elements into the fabric of your operations, you'll ensure that your business can overcome any challenge that comes your way.

Meeting modern RTOs and RPOs

A recent survey found that 46% of organizations test DR quarterly or less

In a world where businesses operate around the clock, data loss and downtime can potentially bring your organization to a standstill. Your business continuity plan should include defining acceptable RTOs and RPOs and strategies to meet these goals. It is also important to remember that even the most advanced backup and DR systems can fail without regular testing. Include regular backup and DR testing in your BCDR plan to make sure backups are complete, available and compatible with your current IT infrastructure. Conduct DR testing regularly to confirm your recovery processes work as expected under real-world conditions. Regular DR testing also helps identify vulnerabilities, fill security gaps, tighten the recovery process and maintain compliance with regulations.

Unified solutions for complex environments

Hybrid environments and multicloud strategies have become critical parts of businesses' digital transformation journeys. Although these strategies offer flexibility, scalability and resilience, the increasingly diverse modern IT environments also introduce data management and security challenges.

A unified approach to data protection is essential to ensure consistent data protection and management across these platforms. A unified solution provides a holistic view of data regardless of where it lives, allowing your IT team to monitor backup statuses, quickly identify risks and address issues proactively. Look for unified solutions, such as Unitrends BCDR, that offer centralized management of your backups. The Unitrends UniView portal provides complete visibility and control across on-premises, endpoints, SaaS and public cloud workloads. It allows you to manage all your backup and recovery needs from a single place instead of logging in to separate systems or switching between multiple tools and interfaces. UniView also includes time-saving automation, file backup policy management and meaningful workflow integrations, which are crucial for optimizing efficiency and safeguarding critical data effortlessly.

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Building a resilient future: Adapting in 2025

Enhancing resilience has become a crucial strategic priority to address emerging threats and the increasing demand for continuous operations. Your organization must adopt reliable backup and disaster recovery solutions that can withstand sophisticated cyberattacks, natural disasters and other threats.

Adopting advanced backup and disaster recovery solutions

Having an advanced backup and DR solution in your arsenal will not only help safeguard your data effectively but also enable you to recover quickly and resume business operations with minimal impact. Look for advanced backup and disaster recovery solutions that provide:

Ransomware detection

Ransomware is one of the biggest threats facing businesses today. With ransomware attacks growing in number and intensity, early detection is key to mitigating the impact and minimizing data loss. BCDR solutions from leading backup vendors come with a ransomware detection feature that spots suspicious activity and alerts IT administrators if there are any abnormal fluctuations.

Air-gapped backups

Air-gapped backup and recovery strategies, like the 3-2-1 backup rule, include storing a copy of data offline to a separate media disconnected from the network. Air-gapped backups enable effective protection by isolating copies of critical data from the primary network. This separation between backups and the network ensures that even if a ransomware attack compromises live systems, the backups remain untouched and secure.

Immutability

Although air-gapped backups provide an additional layer of security, this strategy alone does not completely protect against ransomware and other data threats.

For true immutability, your organization must follow the 3-2-1-1-0 backup rule, the modernized version of the trusted 3-2-1 backup rule. According to this backup rule, you must maintain 3 copies of data on 2 different storage media, with 1 copy located off-site for redundancy and 1 immutable copy. The "0" in the upgraded version stands for ZERO DOUBT IN RECOVERY. Major backup and DR solution providers, like Unitrends, offer automated DR testing, giving you 100% confidence that your DR plan will work as expected in the event of a crisis.

Rapid recovery capabilities

Speed is a critical factor when restoring systems after a disruption. Look for backup solutions with advanced recovery capabilities that enable quick restoration of data, applications and systems. With modern backup and DR solutions, your organization can recover critical workloads within hours instead of days. Invest in a reliable solution that offers instant recovery, virtual machine replication and orchestrated failover to minimize downtime and ensure continuity during emergencies.

Integrating cybersecurity and data protection

While cybersecurity and data protection are two separate functions, many modern BCDR solutions merge backup with proactive threat detection and mitigation to create a holistic approach to safeguarding data and maintaining operational resilience.

Industry-leading BCDR solutions, such as Unitrends Unified BCDR, come equipped with ransomware detection capabilities that use artificial intelligence (AI) and predictive analytics to look for anomalies, such as changes to data files or possible ransomware infections. If any unusual activity is detected, it sends real-time alerts to IT administrators, enabling them to mitigate the threat before it impacts backups.

Endpoint detection and response (EDR) solutions are another proactive detection and mitigation mechanism that can be implemented along with your data protection solutions to strengthen security. EDR solutions monitor and analyze activities across endpoints — PCs, servers and other access points — to detect and respond to threats before they cause damage. By leveraging backup solutions and EDR capabilities, your organization can not only back up endpoint data but also proactively identify and isolate threats before they spread.

As businesses migrate their critical workloads to cloud platforms, such as Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, cloud detection and response (CDR) has become critical for enhanced visibility into cloud environments. Modern solutions, like SaaS Alerts, automatically detect and remediate security issues in SaaS applications within seconds, eliminating the need for human intervention.

Overcome modern BCDR challenges with Unitrends

In 2024, a large minority nearly 50%) of organizations fell victim to ransomware attacks. Threat actors are evolving their tactics, prioritizing user-based attacks. According to the Cost of a Data Breach Report, the average data breach cost increased from $4.45 million in 2023 to $4.88 million in 2024.² These statistics highlight the urgent need to modernize BCDR strategies. To thrive in this unpredictable environment, your organization must embrace comprehensive, proactive approaches that integrate cutting-edge backup, disaster recovery and cybersecurity capabilities.

Unitrends' powerful yet easy-to-use backup and recovery solutions enable you to protect your data no matter where it lives. With Unitrends UniView, you can easily monitor and manage your organization's entire backup and recovery solutions — for data centers, endpoints and SaaS apps — from one place. Our intelligent solutions deliver comprehensive protection against ransomware attacks, data loss and downtime. Unitrends Forever Cloud, a dedicated cloud service, stores your business-critical data in an immutable cloud architecture, giving you complete peace of mind.

Unitrends Recovery Assurance automatically runs DR tests to ensure your backups meet the criteria outlined in your business continuity plan. It verifies compliance with RPO/RTO standards, checks for malware infection and assesses application performance in a failover scenario. Unitrends enables faster recovery, mitigating the impact of an attack and significantly reducing data loss and downtime.

Stay prepared and confidently adapt to the demands of 2025 and beyond with Unitrends Unified BCDR. Request a demo today!

About Unitrends

Unitrends makes efficient, reliable backup and recovery as effortless and hassle-free as possible. It combines deep expertise gained over 30 years of focusing on backup and recovery with next-generation backup appliances and cloud purpose-built to make data protection simpler, more automated and more resilient than any other solution in the industry.

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