CYBERATTACKS are increasingly disrupting digital systems in the Philippines, making data recovery critical to business continuity, a technology firm said during an industry conference this month.
In the third quarter of 2025, cyberattacks surged 49 percent from the previous quarter, with 76 breach incidents compromising more than 4 million accounts, according to a cybersecurity report cited at the CyberSecPhil Conference 2026. The World Economic Forum, in its Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2026, also warned that AI-enabled fraud is emerging as a top risk because generative artificial intelligence tools make scams more convincing and easier to scale.
Organizations heavily dependent on digital systems — including business process outsourcing firms, retail, logistics, healthcare and financial services — face revenue losses and reputational damage even from brief outages.
“With digital operations now central to day-to-day business, the ability to recover data and systems quickly is becoming critical during cyber incidents,” said Claire Huang, country manager for the Philippines of data management firm Synology.
She said traditional backup strategies are no longer sufficient, as attackers increasingly target not only primary systems but also backup and recovery environments.
“Effective data protection is no longer just about keeping copies of data,” Huang said. “It must ensure that data remains secure and immutable and that systems can be restored quickly even if primary environments are compromised.”
Gaps in data protection strategies remain common, including weak access controls and limited system visibility, she added. In some cases, backup environments remain connected to production networks, leaving them exposed during ransomware attacks aimed at disrupting operations.
Under the Data Privacy Act of 2012, organizations are required to implement reasonable and appropriate safeguards to protect personal information, including measures to ensure that data remains available during security incidents.
As IT environments become more complex and distributed, fragmented protection tools and manual recovery processes can slow incident response, Huang said. She added that resilience should now be treated as a core component of security strategy.
“Organizations need coordinated data protection and tested recovery processes to reduce disruption and protect critical operations,” she said.
Synology showcased its ActiveProtect solution at the conference as part of efforts to centralize oversight and improve recovery readiness.
