Spring - Summer 2026 - Journal - Page 27
IT & IT SECURITY
this allows for hackers to cause
an intersection of sophisticated
state-level disruption, corporate
liability and to exploit the
vulnerabilities of everyday public,
civic and educational institutions
inasmuch as those of corporate
entities.”
Given that the threat from
groups such as ShinyHunters
comes from SaaS exploits
and from cloud supply chain
breaches, there is a role for WAN
Acceleration to either eliminate or
reduce the disruption caused by
data breaches.
“Rather than acting after the
fact, it’s important to store data
in at least 3 far-off, disparate
locations to minimise any
disruption and to maintain uptime
by focusing on service continuity,”
he advises. This is because
prevention is always cheaper
than a cure – or than moving
the corporate battle towards
containment, rapid detection and
post-datum recovery.
Trossell argues that it’s no
good accepting the death of
any permitter when it comes to
cyber-security and preventing
data breaches. The goal is to
protect data, and even if a breach
is ex昀椀ltrated it must still be
highly encrypted. Unlike WAN
Optimisation, WAN Acceleration,
data is encrypted in transit.
There is no need, unlike with
WAN Optimisation, to unlock the
data before it can be sent over a
Wide Area Network (WAN). In
contrast, WAN Acceleration with
PORTrockIT deploys a no-touch
approach and its use of arti昀椀cial
intelligence and machine learning
can accelerate the transfer of
data, while obfuscating cybercriminals by making it harder to
divert and access data in transit.
Maintain continuous,
automated offsite replication
By mitigating latency and
maximising bandwidth utilisation
by up to 98%, enterprises can
maintain continuous, automated
offsite replication. They can
frequently push immutably
isolated or air-gapped data to
distant, secure facilities. If a
breach happens, recovery could
– for example - be achieved in
two hours old rather than two
days because WAN Acceleration
achieves up to 50× faster
data recovery performance by
dramatically shortening the
recovery window.
Organisations should
nevertheless treat the events
caused by cybercriminals, such
as ShinyHunters, as a warning
that resilience can no longer
depend on perimeter security,
delayed patching or a reactive
incident response. They need to
be far more proactive to prevent
and curtail any form of cyberdisruption. This begins with
assuming that SaaS platforms,
cloud services and third-party
software supply chains may be at
any point compromised.
Mihai Popa, CISO at
Bridgeworks, explains: “The
lesson from these incidents is that
organisations can no longer plan
for a world where the perimeter
holds. SaaS, cloud platforms
and software supply chains are
now part of the attack surface,
which means resilience has
to be engineered into the way
data is protected, replicated and
recovered. At Bridgeworks, our
focus is on helping organisations
to keep encrypted data moving
securely and rapidly across
distance, so that even when
disruption occurs, recovery is
measured in hours rather than
days.”
This warrants, not just
WAN Acceleration, but also
the prioritisation of continuous
monitoring, rapid and continuous
vulnerability management, strong
identity controls, heightened
data encryption, immutable
backups stored in geographically
dispersed locations that are
regularly tested for replication
and recovery. At the very least,
such plans have to be in place.
This is why WAN Acceleration
is signi昀椀cant – supporting the
practical side of resilience; this
is by enabling organisations to
move voluminous amounts of
highly encrypted data fast across
large distances without being
impinged by the effects of latency
and packet loss.
In a threat landscape where
downtime, data loss and delayed
recovery can be as damaging as
the breach itself. However, with
this technology, organisations
can shift from a purely defensive
posture to one focused on
continuity, prevention and, when
a beach does occur, it can help
with rapid recovery. This posture
therefore revives the perimeter
and it can prevent its ultimate
death.
David Trossell
Mihai Popa
Essential: Act to disrupt
hackers
In terms of prevention, the
goals should be to cut any
cyber-attackers ability to disrupt
operations before any such event
can occur. It is also imperative
to have processes in place to
ensure that any pressure put on
anyone by hackers, doesn’t lead
to a decision that could be costly
昀椀nancial and operationally.
Nobody should be given the
tools to exploit any individual or
organisation, and so they should
be taken out of their hands.
GOVERNMENT AND PUBLIC SECTOR JOURNAL SUMMER/AUTUMN 2026
27
