Members-Only Event
Thursday, October 16, 2025
Presenter: Jeff Liford, Associate Director, Fenix24
In today’s cyber landscape, where threats are constantly evolving, one of the most vital yet overlooked controls is ensuring that you have immutable and tested backups with real Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs). While many organizations focus on perimeter defenses, firewalls, and threat detection systems, they often underestimate the importance of a backup strategy that can be trusted under the harshest conditions.
Threat actors are becoming more sophisticated. They are not just focusing on breaching your defenses but are also targeting and destroying backup systems, leaving organizations vulnerable to extended downtime and irreversible data loss. We’ve seen an uptick in attacks where ransomware groups and nation-state actors aim to lock up critical data and render backup systems useless, forcing victims into tough situations. As these attacks continue to increase in both frequency and severity, businesses without a robust backup strategy face a serious risk of falling victim to cyber incidents that can take weeks or even months to recover from.
The key to surviving these attacks is not just having backups in place but ensuring they are immutable, meaning they cannot be altered or deleted by unauthorized users, including attackers. Furthermore, these backups need to be regularly tested to validate their effectiveness in actual recovery scenarios, ensuring that you can restore operations quickly and with minimal business disruption. Without a reliable, tested backup system with established RTOs, the damage from a cyber-attack can be devastating.
As we look ahead, the importance of backup systems cannot be overstated. It's not just a cybersecurity measure—it's an essential part of your organization's continuity plan. You may be thinking about firewalls, detection systems, or encryption, but the most important control—one you might not be focusing on—is ensuring your backups are as strong as your primary defenses
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About the Presenter:
Jeff Liford, Associate Director, Fenix24
Jeff Liford is an IT leader, educator, and cybersecurity resilience expert with more than 15 years of experience across the military, federal, and private sectors. Currently an Associate Director at Fenix24, he leads high-impact cyber incident recovery efforts and strategic process improvement initiatives.
A former U.S. Army Senior Intelligence Analyst and long-time Adjunct Professor at the University of Alaska Anchorage, Jeff blends hands-on technical expertise with a passion for teaching. His work focuses on building resilient systems, mentoring future engineers, and empowering teams to grow through disruption.