Kris Lovejoy (Kyndryl)
Kyndryl is now offering a “recovery retainer service,” providing its own expert personnel as on-the-ground help to businesses recovering from ransomware and other types of cyber attacks.
The service starts work before attacks happen, however — part of the offering is expert review and remediation of cyber attack preparedness, ensuring that organisations aren’t making easy targets of themselves. If an attack does occur, Kyndryl can provide live expert advice, either virtually or physically at the client’s facilities, to help ensure that critical data can be recovered and systems brought back online with a minimum of fuss.
Lots of companies offer forensics as part of their recovery retainer services, but Kyndryl’s provision of on-the-ground experts to help with recovery is less common. Kris Lovejoy, global practice leader for Kyndryl’s security and resiliency practice, said in a statement that the service is intended as a complement to existing disaster recovery services.
“We need to see a shift in this field, from simply security to one of ‘cyber resilience'," she said. "The public and private sector need both because today it is no longer a question of whether cyber attackers will breach our defences, but when will they break through and how much damage they will do."
According to Philip Harris, research director for risk, advisory, management and privacy at IDC, the service dovetails nicely with Kyndryl’s own orchestration and cyber vaulting tools, which were released in April.
Those services provide for machine learning-based configuration checking, the ability to automate certain aspects of disaster recovery, and air-gapped backup systems to provide “known-good” configurations when recovering compromised systems.
“They’re building something around their cyber incident recovery service to help organisations,” Harris said. “Cyber recovery implies the ability to recovery from a ransomware attack with all your data intact.”
Kyndyl was spun off from its parent company, IBM, in November of last year. Formerly operating as IBM’s disaster recovery division, the company has made numerous partnerships with companies like Lenovo, Red Hat, NetApp and others, in addition to making an acquisition of its own — Finnish financial services tech provider Samlink.
