Cyber resilience is as much about bouncing back as it is about keeping threats out. At this year’s Control24 summit, Dell and Accenture took a hard stance on an evolving truth: cyber resilience today isn’t about building bigger digital walls but about how fast you can recover when the inevitable happens.
Why Fortifying Defences wont deliver Rapid Recovery
Liz Campbell, Dell’s EMEA Cyber Leader, and Christian, Accenture’s UK & Ireland Cyber Strategy Head, challenged the conventional ‘keep them out’ mindset. With threat actors adapting and even using AI to penetrate defences, they argued, it’s no longer realistic to think your walls will hold forever.
“Building bigger walls is outdated thinking,” Liz explained. “Today’s resilience relies on recovery solutions that go beyond traditional disaster recovery (DR) methods, which are usually too slow and don’t account for the way cyber threats move.”
Christian added that traditional DR was designed for limited, single-location outages, not for the rapid, multi-layered attacks we see today. The result? An over-reliance on old strategies, leaving a significant gap in organisations’ actual readiness. “Without a recovery plan that fits modern threats, many businesses are just replicating infected data across locations—hardly a safeguard in a ransomware attack,” he noted.
Isolated Data Vaults: Safeguarding Your Recovery
Dell has taken proactive steps to close this gap with its air-gapped data vaults. These isolated copies of critical data are untouchable by attackers during an incident, offering businesses a guaranteed path to recovery.
Elizabeth elaborated:
“Having a secure, isolated copy of data is not a luxury; it’s essential. If you’re hit with ransomware, you want assurance that you have an untouched copy of your data ready to bring you back online—no spreading, no replicating bad data.”
This approach from Dell signals a shift from “keep them out” to “keep your data safe” so recovery becomes more assured. It’s about prioritising continuity, even if the worst happens.
Accenture’s Recovery-First Resilience Strategy
While Dell focuses on the tech, Accenture brings the strategy. Christian described how Accenture helps companies map out a recovery-first approach that considers which services are mission-critical, minimising downtime by prioritising key recovery steps.
“The reality is, no business can withstand being down for days, let alone weeks,” Christian said. “Rapid recovery isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s essential to staying competitive. Our work with Dell means we can deliver both the infrastructure and the game plan for resilience.” Accenture helps companies outline their top priorities, building recovery plans around what matters most so clients aren’t just reacting but responding with clarity and speed.
Resilience as an Ecosystem: Predatar, Dell, and Accenture
Cyber resilience is never a solo act; it’s about bringing together the right technology and strategic guidance to create an ecosystem of recovery. This is where solutions like Predatar come in, alongside Dell and Accenture’s collaboration. Predatar’s platform focuses on continuous testing and ensuring data is not just backed up but truly recoverable, pushing resilience from theory to practice.
By integrating Dell’s data vaults with Accenture’s strategic planning and Predatar’s continuous recovery assurance, businesses can stay ahead. It’s a holistic approach, where each partner addresses a unique part of the recovery challenge, ensuring companies are prepared not only to respond to an attack but to recover in a way that keeps their operations stable and their reputation intact.
Building a Recovery Assured Cyber Strategy
Liz and Christian’s session at Control24 laid down the essentials for building resilience that goes beyond defences. Here are a few takeaways:
- Invest in Isolated Data Vaults: Off-network, air-gapped data storage (such as a vault) ensures you have a clean copy of critical data to prevent malware from spreading.
- Adopt a Recovery-First Mindset: The combination of planning and the right technical solutions lets businesses pivot from pure prevention to recovery-first thinking.
- Leverage Predatar for Assurance: Predatar brings proactive recovery testing into the equation, validating that your data isn’t just backed up but truly recoverable when it matters.
- Engage Leadership in Resilience: Effective resilience planning extends beyond IT; it requires senior leadership to understands the value and invests accordingly.
Ultimately, cyber resilience today isn’t about stopping every threat. It’s about ensuring that, when attackers break through, your business can recover fast, strong, and with confidence. By working as an ecosystem, Predatar, Dell, and Accenture are leading the way in showing that resilience is about far more than prevention—it’s about being ready for what comes next.
