Strengthening continuity in federal data systems

Any operational disruption within a federal agency can halt critical workflows, erode public trust, and, in worst-case scenarios, threaten national security. Therefore, IT leaders must implement rigorous, data-driven assessments to gauge exposure and guarantee mission continuity.

Federal agencies confront persistent threats — from ransomware to climate-related outages — that no preventive measure can fully eliminate unless systems are truly offline or airgapped. To contain damage and restore operations swiftly, organizations must embed data resilience into their critical infrastructure. Strengthening recovery capabilities and accelerating data restoration are no longer optional.

Veeam’s latest study places data resilience as the second-highest enterprise IT priority over the next 24 months. Agencies consistently rank data security first, with dependable backup and recovery in close pursuit. Yet true resilience is never a one-and-done exercise; it is a dynamic maturity journey that requires continuous measurement, targeted investments and iterative refinement.

The Veeam Data Resilience Maturity Model (DRMM), co-designed with McKinsey and leading experts from MIT, Palo Alto Networks, and Microsoft, delivers a vendor-neutral framework tailored for federal adoption. It enables agencies to benchmark current capabilities and plot a step-by-step roadmap from basic defenses to an industry-leading resilience posture.

From cybersecurity to resilience 

Government-wide zero trust is an essential security baseline. Yet these controls aim only to keep adversaries at bay. True resilience assumes intrusions will occur and focuses on maintaining core operations and accelerating recovery when prevention inevitably breaks down.

Overconfidence in cyber defenses frequently masks structural gaps until a real‐world incident exposes them. Without a unified, transparent view of their resilience posture, agencies live one outage away from catastrophic mission failure. Whether an attack cripples emergency response systems or a flood destroys unprotected data, lives and public confidence hang in the balance.

At the same time, rapid adoption of AI, edge computing and hybrid-cloud architectures has dramatically expanded the threat surface. Federal leaders now must secure distributed workloads and mission-critical datasets across a mosaic of environments — far beyond the walls of legacy data centers.

Turning goals into progress 

Many agencies recognize the need for resilience but lack a standardized, quantitative method to gauge advancement. The DRMM solves this by defining four maturity tiers, from Basic through Advanced, each with explicit capability benchmarks and associated investment profiles.

For instance, organizations at the Basic level often depend on manual runbooks and isolated backup islands. In contrast, Advanced agencies deploy end-to-end automation, orchestration and real-time resilience dashboards to shrink recovery-time objectives and contain impact. Benchmarking against the DRMM reveals specific gaps and drives prioritized funding to accelerate upward progression.

Key benefits for federal use include:

• Comprehensive assessment: A unified framework for evaluating resilience across security, backup and recovery domains.
• Mandate alignment: Direct mapping to federal standards (FISMA, CISA Performance Goals) and mission-critical objectives.
• Progressive roadmap: A scalable maturity path from reactive, ad hoc processes to proactive, automated resilience.
• Unified metrics: A common language for reporting progress to executives, oversight bodies and external auditors.

Laying a foundation for success 

Disruption is no longer hypothetical — it is operational inevitability. Federal IT executives must demonstrate mission readiness through measurable metrics and strict accountability. The DRMM serves as the authoritative roadmap for showing progress, bolstering compliance and guaranteeing uninterrupted service delivery when it counts most.

Learn more about how Veeam’s DRMM can help your agency strengthen data resilience.