How data governance builds resilience against corruption and disruption

In the previous blog, we explored how data moves through its lifecycle — from creation to deletion. But managing data effectively is only part of the challenge; organizations must also ensure that data remains available, secure, and resilient against disruptions at every stage.

Resilience is not just about recovery, it requires proactive governance to prevent, detect, and respond to risks such as cyberattacks, accidental deletion, misconfigurations, and infrastructure failures.

A well-structured data governance framework bakes resilience into every stage of the data lifecycle, reducing the risk of disruptions and increasing the chance of a quick recovery when incidents do occur.

Data may be a strategic asset, but when systems go down — whether from human error, software bugs, misconfigurations, or cyberattacks — that asset quickly becomes a liability. In a digital-first world, organizations must be prepared not only to defend their data but also to recover it quickly and completely when something goes wrong. 

And something will go wrong. 

Why resilience matters more than ever 

Outages and disruptions are more common than many leaders assume — and often for reasons that have little to do with cybercrime. According to Splunk’s report, “The Hidden Costs of Downtime,” 56% of downtime incidents stem from security issues (like phishing), while 44% are tied to application or infrastructure failures. In both cases, human error is the leading cause and often the hardest to detect or remediate. 

For modern CIOs and CISOs, resilience must be built in, and data governance has a vital role to play. 

Three pillars of data resilience: Prevention, detection, and recovery 

To ensure that data remains available, accurate, and secure, governance strategies should address three core components of resilience: 

• Prevention: Building technical and procedural safeguards to maintain uptime and prevent data loss or corruption (e.g., robust architecture, access controls, SLAs). 

• Detection: Identifying threats or outages quickly using log monitoring, real-time alerts, and integrity checks. 

• Recovery: Having proven, tested, and executable processes to restore data and systems after a disruption. 

Many organizations are strong on prevention and detection — but recovery is often underdeveloped and under-tested. That’s where governance can make the biggest difference. 

What’s actually causing outages? (Hint: It’s not always attackers) 

Cyberattacks make headlines — and they should. But most outages stem from more mundane issues: 

• Power loss: 44% 
• Network failure: 14%  
• IT systems: 13% 
• Cooling problems: 13% 
• Third-party provider issues: 8% 

Two recent, real-world examples drive this home: 

• In May 2024, Australian pension fund UniSuper lost its entire Google Cloud account — including backups — due to a rare misconfiguration on Google’s side. The incident left over 647,000 members without access for nearly two weeks. What made recovery possible? A governance-aligned UniSuper had maintained an independent third-party backup. 

• Just two months later, in July 2024, a faulty update from cybersecurity vendor CrowdStrike brought down an estimated 8.5 million Windows systems worldwide, in what’s now described as the largest IT outage in history. 

Governance strategies must account for these non-malicious, high-impact events — and not just as IT risks. They’re operational, compliance, and board-level concerns. 

Backup isn’t just an IT function — it’s a governance issue 

When disruptions happen, recovery is what matters most. But too often, backup and recovery are still treated as technical insurance policies — set once and subsequently forgotten. To build real resilience, backup and recovery need to be governed. That means: 

• Knowing where backups live, how they’re protected, and who can access them 
• Ensuring backups are immutable and stored independently (offsite or in a separate cloud) 
• Testing recovery regularly and realistically 
• Making backup part of your compliance and governance discussions 

For example, the NIS2 Directive (a major piece of cybersecurity legislation in the EU) explicitly requires “backup management and disaster recovery” as part of business continuity planning. That’s not just a technical checkbox — it’s an organizational obligation, with liability extending to leadership. 

Governance makes this real by ensuring backup and recovery are:

• Defined 
• Accountable 
• Auditable 
• Resourced 

Resilience isn’t a hope — it’s a process 

Too often, backup systems and recovery processes have been managed with a “set it and forget it” approach — organizations select a solution, define some processes, and then largely ignore them except for occasional surface-level checks. 

But this hope-for-the-best approach isn’t good enough — not for your organization, and not for regulators. Resilience takes deliberate training and testing to build, maintain, and validate your ability to recover from a data loss or corruption event. 

Training ensures every team member understands their role in recovery, so decisions can be made and workflows executed under pressure. 

Testing goes beyond checking if a backup exists. It proves that full recovery is possible, even for complex, high-stakes systems. After all, an emergency is not the time to discover that a critical system now ingests data differently — or that a restore process fails. 

Given the reality of limited resources, CIOs and CISOs must make strategic recovery choices. That means asking: 

• Which data is most important to our operations? 
• What systems need to be restored first? 
• What are our compliance or contractual obligations? 

These questions fall under data governance, not just IT operations. Governance ensures that recovery is not just possible, but purposeful. 

Guidelines: How to test your recovery plan 

Governance brings clarity and control to recovery planning. It ensures alignment with stakeholders, data prioritization, and realistic recovery plans. Backup alone doesn’t make you resilient. You also need to: 

• Train your team — so they know their roles when recovery is needed 
• Test your systems — so failures are found before a real crisis, and then make yourself heard. Share the findings with leadership and the organization to ensure issues are addressed. 
• Prioritize your recovery plans — because not all data or systems are equally urgent 

Effective recovery takes more than good intentions: It takes rigorous testing. These seven steps should be part of any governance-aligned disaster recovery program: 

• Validate recovery capability — test that backups can restore critical data without data loss or corruption. 
• Define acceptable downtime — align recovery time objectives (RTOs) with business needs.  
• Test regularly — frequent testing helps uncover hidden gaps and builds confidence. 
• Simulate different failure scenarios — recover individual files, entire databases, or full systems under pressure. 
• Document and analyze results — capture what worked, what didn’t, and what to fix. 
• Include relevant stakeholders — make recovery planning a cross-functional effort. 
• Iterate and improve — update your plans and procedures based on findings and changes in your environment. 

Following these testing guidelines strengthens your IT compliance posture and prepares your organization to face evolving cyberthreats with confidence. 

Resilience is governance in action 

Building resilience against data corruption and disruption is not about achieving perfection — it’s about ensuring you can recover quickly, efficiently, and confidently when things go wrong. 

In a world of rising regulatory expectations and increasingly complex environments, backup and recovery must move from the server room to the boardroom. 

That shift starts with governance — embedded at every stage of the data lifecycle. 

Organizations that assess and align their governance, backup strategies, and detection capabilities will be better positioned to navigate uncertainty, ensure business continuity, and lead with confidence.

This article is part three of a five-part series based on our recent publication, “Intelligent data governance: Why taking control of your data is key for operational continuity and innovation.” You can find the other blogs in this series below.