Outage to Outlast: Key Insights on Building Operational Resilience for IBM Power

The cyber landscape is shifting fast and organisations running IBM Power workloads are feeling the pressure. From rising ransomware attempts to increasingly complex hybrid environments, resilience has become a top priority.

To explore these challenges, we recently hosted our webinar “Outage to Outlast: Building Operational Resilience for IBM Power Systems” in collaboration with IBM, featuring expert speakers Andrew Laidlaw (IBM) and Jack Wilkins (Celerity).

Here’s a high-level overview of the discussion, you can find the full on-demand session here.

One of the central themes was the accelerating pace and impact of cyber threats. While ransomware remains the most prominent risk, AI-driven attacks are now emerging and becoming harder to detect, with 1 in 6 breaches involving AI. Despite this risk, AI also presents a cost saving opportunity, security teams using AI and automation lower the cost of a breach by 1.9 million USD.

Andrew highlighted recent UK incidents involving well-known brands where disruption lasted weeks, with the Jaguar Land Rover attack reportedly costing 1.9 billion. A stark reminder that even large, well-resourced organisations can struggle to recover quickly when core systems are affected.

The takeaway? Threats are growing in sophistication, and recovery needs to be faster, cleaner and more predictable.

Many Power clients are modernising through hybrid cloud: extending workloads into cloud platforms, connecting applications through APIs and scaling resources across environments.

This delivers real benefits: flexibility, cost efficiency, powerful DR options. But it also comes with new risks.

The speakers walked through:

• How hybrid architectures expand the attack surface
• Why network pathways and permissions must be tightly controlled
• The importance of secure, consistent configurations across on-prem and cloud

But the message wasn’t one of avoidance, it was about awareness and opportunity. When designed with resilience in mind, hybrid cloud can significantly strengthen recovery capabilities.

Most organisations believe their backups are enough to get them out of trouble. In reality, backups alone rarely guarantee a smooth recovery.

Common issues discussed included:

• backups that restore technically, but applications don’t start
• missing or inconsistent data
• slow restore times
• uncertainty about whether a copy is “clean” after a cyber incident

The session explored why regular testing is the missing link for many organisations and how testing uncovers risks that day-to-day operations simply don’t reveal.

This part of the conversation led into a real-world example…

During the webinar, Jack shared the story of a large food manufacturer facing ongoing resilience challenges within their IBM Power environment. Despite investing in modernising their storage and backup approach, they still struggled with one crucial issue: their systems couldn’t recover quickly or reliably enough to meet operational requirements.

By evolving their strategy and making smarter use of existing IBM technologies, they achieved a dramatic improvement in recovery speed, confidence and overall resilience.

If this sounds familiar, you may want to explore our detailed case study with Oscar Mayer, where we break down the full transformation. Read it here.

For organisations unsure where to begin or how to make meaningful progress, our speakers shared a set of simple, practical starting points:

• Perform a risk assessment to understand your exposure
• Strengthen identity controls, especially MFA for privileged access
• Maintain patching discipline across firmware, OS and applications
• Review your backup strategy, ensuring immutability and offsite copies
• Test recoveries regularly, not just annually

No matter the size of your budget or team, these steps can make a real difference.

The webinar goes much deeper into:

• real-world cyber incidents
• hybrid-cloud resilience strategies
• recovery validation
• what to look out for in your own environment
• and a live demonstration of a modern approach to automated IBM Power recovery testing

If you’re responsible for IBM Power, cyber resilience, or continuity planning, this is one you won’t want to miss.

Watch the webinar on demand here.