Modern threats demand modern defenses. Cloud-native is the new baseline.
Every organization is investing in cyberresilience tools, training, and processes. Unfortunately, only some of them will be able to successfully respond and recover from an attack. Regardless of how hard they work, many IT and security teams are constrained by legacy technology architectures that were built for the challenges of 2015, not 2025.
The rapid growth of cloud and AI has unlocked unprecedented agility and scale. Cyberattackers are leveraging modern technology, but traditional data protection and security tools are lagging behind. This disconnect is not sustainable; we are at an inflection point where cloud-native data protection is now an imperative.
For years, companies used a do-it-yourself approach to build data security from a mix of software, hardware, and appliances. They spent their time managing capacity, applying patches, and troubleshooting. Some then attempted to shoehorn those traditional solutions into the cloud, which meant lifting and shifting legacy architectures.
These approaches, designed for a bygone era of IT, are crumbling under the weight of escalating cyber threats, new regulations, and the rising costs that come with data sprawl.
The forces driving a fundamental shift
Several converging trends are accelerating the need for a radically different approach to cyber resilience.
The evolving threat landscape
Cyberattacks continue to evolve, and ransomware has become more sophisticated. Attackers use GenAI to create malware, phish users with social engineering, and compromise AI systems with prompt injections. Once they have found a way to breach the perimeter, the attackers lurk for months conducting reconnaissance about the environment. Once they have credentials and intelligence, they compromise backup systems before attacking the production data, so that recovery without paying the ransom is impossible.
Threat actors continue to expand their targets. As data center perimeter security has improved, threat actors are now targeting cloud environments. Furthermore, there has been an increase in attacks on smaller companies, municipalities, and hospitals. Regardless of how strong an organization’s perimeter security is, no one’s data sets are safe.
Therefore, response and recovery has become increasingly important.
Mounting regulatory and compliance pressures
Data privacy, sovereignty, and rapid recovery are no longer optional; increasingly stringent global regulations mandate them. Many existing data protection tools lack the granular control, auditable trails, and inherent resilience mechanisms required to meet modern compliance frameworks without significant manual intervention and risk.
Increasing costs due to data sprawl
Data sprawl across cloud workloads, SaaS platforms, and edge environments is driving up the cost of securing data. Organizations are forced to invest in an expanding mix of software tools and storage infrastructure to protect dispersed data. Licensing for backup software, servers and storage becomes increasingly expensive when each environment requires its own siloed stack.
In addition to capital costs, data sprawl introduces management complexity that inflates operational costs. IT teams must now track and enforce policies across multiple platforms, which increases the risk of configuration errors, missed backups, and inefficient storage usage. Maintaining consistent security and compliance policies across a fractured landscape requires organizations to spend more on the tools, time and teams to operate and audit them.
Organizations cannot overcome these new challenges with legacy approaches. They need solutions built from the ground up to protect against cyberattacks, meet new compliance regulations, and centrally protect all their data. They need a new approach to data protection that solves for today and into the future.
The defining characteristics of cloud-native cyber resilience
To navigate this new reality, organizations need cloud-native solutions built for multi-cloud cyber resilience, not just backup. What defines a cloud-native cyber resilience platform, and how can you evaluate the difference between cloud-based backup and cloud-native cyber resilience?
Here are four characteristics that distinguish effective cloud-native cyber resilience solutions:
- No-touch architecture: A cloud-native platform is built from the ground up to eliminate infrastructure dependencies. That means no hardware, no manual patching, and no clunky agents to manage. This design enables rapid deployment, automatic updates, and effortless scaling across environments, which significantly reduces operational overhead.
- Zero-trust as a service: Cloud-native resilience goes beyond mere backup. It ensures data is effectively isolated, air-gapped, and immutable, meaning backups are logically and physically separated from production environments. This critical architectural separation provides the necessary defense against ransomware, insider threats, and accidental deletions, offering a level of protection far beyond what single-cloud-resident backups can provide.
- Seamless resilience across data environments: Unlike siloed tools, cloud-native solutions offer unified protection wherever data resides, from data center to SaaS applications to cloud. This capability is critical for mitigating management complexity, ensuring compliance, and standardizing cyber security. True cloud-native solutions also protect against regional and cloud provider outages by enabling cross-region and cross-cloud data recovery.
- Optimized for cloud economics: By leveraging cloud-native storage and compute optimizations, these platforms inherently reduce operational complexity and cost. Features like global deduplication and compression drastically cut storage footprints and eliminate unexpected egress fees, delivering predictable and optimized cloud storage economics.
Embracing a cloud-native, truly resilient future
The industry is now recognizing the critical need for the shift to cloud-native cyber resilience. Organizations need a unified approach that detects threats within backup data, accelerates response, and simplifies recovery across all their data. Proactive threat hunting, AI-powered threat detection, and seamless integration with broader security ecosystems are becoming core requirements.
Industry leaders are validating the market shift towards cloud-native resilience. For instance, Druva’s recognition as a leader in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Backup and Data Protection Platforms underscores the maturation of this approach and its increasing importance for enterprise data security.
In an era where cyberattacks are inevitable, resilience is paramount. This requires a fundamental rethink of data protection, transforming it from a passive insurance policy into an active, intelligent layer that aids in response and recovery.
The future of data protection is cloud-native: fully managed, intrinsically secure, and designed from the ground up to empower businesses with the simplicity, control, and peace of mind needed to thrive in the modern world. For IT and security leaders, the time to embrace this new baseline for cyber resilience is now.
Contributed by Druva.
