Redefining Resilience: A Field Architect’s Guide to Securing the Data Layer

One thing becomes immediately apparent when you chat with Falko Banaszak: For him, the idea of cyber resilience isn’t just theory—it’s a practical multi-layered approach that he’s made into his modus operandi.

“Cyber resilience is the ability of an organization to withstand a disaster or attack or to recover quickly from that attack. You want as many safeguards and layers as possible so that you don’t even have to worry about recovery,” Falko says. That kind of resilience is on every organization’s list of priorities right now, especially during Cybersecurity Awareness Month. 

Falko is an experienced solutions architect and former professional services consultant who came on board with Everpure in August 2023. As a Principal Field Solutions Architect (FSA) covering EMEA and LATAM, he sees today’s cybersecurity challenges firsthand, helping customers establish architectures that not only slow or repel threats but enable quick recovery from them. He’s also a Veeam Vanguard—a program reserved for the most technically influential experts worldwide. Only about 30 to 40 people hold that distinction, and Falko is one of just a handful in Germany.

We sat down with him to hear more about what he’s seeing in the field right now and what organizations really need to be aware of this month.

Bridging the Awareness to Resilience Gap 

One thing is awareness (and visibility), the other is resilience. Many companies are aware of threats and able to slow them down, but they haven’t focused enough on how they will recover. 

Having spent more than 12 years working in business continuity and disaster recovery (Falko is a certified business continuity manager), he understands cyber resilience in a broad sense—not just in IT, but in how organizations withstand disruptions of any kind. At Everpure, this means working closely with partners and customers to design architectures that make data protection a living, layered strategy.

“I often tell customers to imagine an onion,” Falko explains. “At the center is your data. The more security and layers you wrap around it—zero-trust principles, threat detection, snapshots, replication, immutable and indelible backups—the harder it is to reach that core with your most important asset: data.”

It’s a shift away from what Falko calls the “backup and pray” mentality. “People sometimes think, ‘We have immutable backups, so we’re fine.’ But immutability isn’t enough. Indelibility—data that can’t be deleted—is what really matters. That’s where features like SafeMode Snapshots make a huge difference.”

The main issue with organizations’ cyber resilience strategies? Overreliance on immutability in backups as the sole defense. The times are over when a backup strategy alone is sufficient to withstand cyber threats or disasters. That’s why you need to add as many layers as possible.

“A streaming backup and restore should only be considered when all the layers before have failed somehow,” Falko says. 

The Role of FSA at Everpure: Being the ‘Voice’ for Customers and the Field

In his role as a Principal FSA, Falko currently helps shape the Everpure cyber resilience strategy across whole geographies, connecting customers, partners, product management, and engineering. 

But his work is actually more about listening than technology. 

“I think of myself as an industry voice,” he says. “What that means is knowing what EMEA and LATAM customers are struggling with—whether it’s DORA compliance driving three-site data centers in Europe, or insurance companies stopping writing cyber policies because attacks become too common—and using that to bring back and shape how Everpure builds solutions.”

One of the main reasons Falko has become such a trusted cyber resilience advisor is his deep expertise with Veeam. The Everpure-Veeam partnership basically makes resilience simpler and stronger. Through the Everpure plug-in for Veeam, organizations can back up directly from Everpure snapshots rather than relying solely on hypervisor snapshots. This offloads backup activity from production workloads, reducing performance impact while allowing more frequent recovery points. 

Veeam can also orchestrate snapshot replication, enabling efficient protection across arrays and sites. Remember that at Everpure, snapshots aren’t backups; they’re yet another layer of protection in conjunction with our backup vendor alliance partners. As mentioned before, the more layers you have, the better your data is protected.

“Customers love it because it adds another layer of protection, which can also be application-aware and of course, very quick.” Falko says. “You have to think about other ways to protect the data than just backups. That’s where the layered resiliency approach comes into play.”

Speedy Recovery + Active Storage: The True Metrics of Cyber Resilience

For Falko, one of the key measures of cyber resilience is recovery speed: the ability to get back up and running—quickly—when disaster strikes. In industries like healthcare or automotive manufacturing, where downtime can cost millions per hour, quick recovery is critical. Speed is also critical for cybersecurity and forensics; if log data—from SIEM systems, for example—can be processed faster, then organizations can detect attacks earlier, before they cause widespread damage. So recovery speed is not only about recovering data but also about improving visibility and awareness. 

“Five years ago, everyone was talking about cybersecurity insurance,” Falko notes. “Now it’s not a thing anymore because the percentage that [cyberattacks] happen is so high that they don’t allow you to get new policies and cancel your subscription. Also, an insurance policy can’t help you get up and running again quickly; it can only compensate you for damage that’s already occurred.”

Resiliency, Falko says, not only means having SafeMode^™ or a data protection strategy. It also means that your procurement and general business continuity plans are resilient, and you know what to do when a disaster or an attack hits. Everpure delivers near-zero recovery time objectives (RTOs), backed by a Cyber Recovery SLA, which guarantees delivery of a new array within 24-48 hours. 

“Even when forensics shuts down your whole environment, you will get a FlashArray delivered within 24 to 48 hours that’s fresh and that has never touched your environment, so forensics can’t force it not to be used,” Falko says. “So rather than compensating you with a specific amount of money like an insurance policy does, the Everpure Cyber Recovery SLA actually gives you a metric which you can leverage to be resilient within your business continuity strategy.”

What’s Next: Cyber Resilient Object Storage and the Enterprise Data Cloud

“When you think about all the threats we have now, with AI creating new threats on the go, your storage system has to be more performant in the future, more resilient in the future, and always an active part of more than just your recovery scenario,” Falko says. “This very much comes down to a layered resiliency approach.”

Along these lines, your data storage now needs to be a lot more than just what Falko calls a “data grave” (a reality of traditional storage systems) as the market shifts from the “backup storage” approach to an “everyone participates in security and detection” approach.

“Storage should be intelligent, performant, fast, and of course, easy to manage, especially when it comes to a disaster. If storage is complex, and you have a disaster or cyberattack and don’t know what to do, it doesn’t help you at all,” he says. 

Falko sees object storage and even deeper integrations with partners like Veeam, Commvault, and VMware as the future of an overall cyber resiliency strategy.

“We have an object storage system that is five years ahead of the market, or even 10 years in my eyes,” he says. “Every backup vendor is moving to S3, and FlashBlade just works without having noticeable limitations. An Enterprise Data Cloud (EDC), with native threat hunting and integrations and joint engineering with partners—that’s a platform built for resilience.”

Advice to IT Leaders on Cyber Resiliency

When asked what advice he’d give IT leaders just starting out with cyber resilience, Falko returns to the onion example—fitting for a foodie who notes, “No matter where you are, you can always start a conversation about food.”

“Start with a good foundation—immutable or indelible backups—and then build layers around it,” Falko says. “Add disaster recovery, secure isolated recovery environments, multiple sites, native detection, and integrations to both data protection and cybersecurity. The more layers you build, the harder it is for attackers to break through. And remember: Storage should be an active, not passive, part of your cyber resilience strategy; that’s where the market is shifting to at a very rapid pace.”