2025 saw some of the most audacious cyber attacks in UK history with retail giants M&S and Jaguar Land Rover’s operations both paralysed by hackers.
Operational resilience and business continuity are fast becoming critical concerns for many C‑Suites. With the renewed focus on resilience, we were keen to share some of our insights with the wider industry.
Our recent webinar in partnership with data backup testing and recovery experts Veeam, was aimed at spreading awareness about infrastructure resilience best practice in a constantly challenging operational landscape.
In attendance were a wide range of organisations such as educational institutions and SMEs from highly regulated sectors such as insurance, banking, finance, legal and manufacturing.
Operational Resilience is more than just disaster recovery
Mark Kirby, Professional Services Director led a comprehensive discussion on operational resilience highlighting the fact that the term goes beyond just disaster recovery. It’s the ability of an organisation to continue delivering critical services through disruption (be it cyber attack, power outage or natural disaster), adapting to risks and recovering quickly.
“Operational resilience is a holistic process that covers people, processes, systems, technology and even third-party vendors in your supply chain,” said Mark.
He spoke of how resilience must now be treated as a top business priority, overseen by the board and C‑suite.
“It’s no longer just an IT issue,” added Mark.
To be truly resilient, organisations would need to analyse their breaking points and ensure all staff knew their roles during crises. Mark also touched on the various regulators and regulations across the UK and EU which mandate operational resilience in specific sectors from the FCA/PRA and DORA, to NIS2.
Cyber security in the supply chain is another key element of operational resilience and Mark urged the attendees to ensure they were implementing basic security measures such as multi-factor authentication, staff training and due diligence of vendors to help mitigate supply chain vulnerabilities.
How to design resilient infrastructure
Intersys’ Head of IT Infrastructure Yacer Sellam, then provided a detailed walkthrough of how businesses evolve their infrastructure for resilience, using a case study of ‘Bob’s business’ to illustrate the progression from basic setups to advanced redundancy, failover, and monitoring strategies.
Yacer charted a typical start-up’s infrastructure journey from basic, local redundancy (NAS devices) to cloud backups, onsite and offsite replication and the addition of IT support and server infrastructure to keep up with growth. Yacer stressed the importance of regular failover testing, monitoring, alerting, and disaster recovery runbooks to ensure that high availability measures are effective and failures are detected promptly.
Mark and Yacer also discussed the misconceptions around cloud resilience (no, it’s not fool-proof), the necessity of optimising cloud environments, the critical role of backup strategies (including retention policies, multiple copies and tamper-proof backups), while offering practical advice for organisations.
Veeam Data Cloud demonstration
A quick introduction by Florin Micu, Inside Hosting Manager at Veeam, was followed by a live demonstration of Veeam Data Cloud by Ilya Sletov, Systems Engineer. Ilya showed the webinar participants how Veeam Data Cloud can back up Microsoft 365 and Azure workloads, roll out policy configuration, restore options and create audit trails. He also previewed integration features with practical examples and technical explanations.
We hope the participants found this session a useful introduction to the theme of operational resilience through IT infrastructure. For more best practice on backup and disaster recovery testing, see our blog.
Click here to view the webinar on our YouTube channel.