Confucius once said famously, “A man who does not plan long ahead will find trouble at his door.” No truer words could be spoken about today’s cyberthreat landscape. According to Cybersecurity Magazine, ransomware attacks are predicted to surge from occurring every 11 seconds now, to every two seconds over the next decade. As such, business continuity planning has never been more significant to individuals and organizations. What will your organization do when it finds trouble like a ransomware attack knocking at it’s front door?
“A man who does not plan long ahead will find trouble at his door.”
-Confucius
In understanding the characteristics of cyber threats, it is vital to first understand what a malicious cyberattack might entail. Such attacks are conducted by either organized groups or lone individuals with the aim of disrupting an organization’s data integrity and availability. This differs significantly from traditional disaster recovery scenarios, where a physical event in a data center might cause an abrupt loss of ongoing transactions and, for instance, erase data accumulated over the preceding 24 hours. Essentially, in such cases, the loss is quantifiable, allowing for planning and successful recovery within predefined parameters known as recovery point objectives (RPOs).
However, defining a recovery point objective or the maximum acceptable data loss for cyberattacks proves indefinable. A cyberattack can result in the loss of data spanning days, weeks, or even months. Initially, the cyberattack renders the retrieval of connected data impossible, followed by the disabling or destruction of data backups and, subsequently, the production data itself. This culminates in either complete or protracted data loss, rendering standard backup recovery ineffective.
This is why traditional business continuity planning, which usually revolves around data recovery protocols within 1 or 24 hours, must now innovate in seeking alternative sources or methods for data restoration.
How your Business Continuity Program can help prepare for this threat
Considerations for Business Continuity Programs:
Vital Data Identification: identify, prioritize, and gain approval of the organization’s vital / must-have data requiring additional levels of data protection and assurance.
Secured Backups: maintain offline and/or immutable (unchangeable) copies of the organization’s material / vital data to help ensure clean data is available for recovery following a compromised data incident.
Data Restoration – ensure there is an isolated environment to safely restore the secured data and verify it is clean / uncompromised before restoring it back into the production environment.
Data Recreation: identify potential business continuity options to recreate the lost data through other means (i.e., manually recounting a distribution center).
Data Rebuild: identify potential business continuity options to rebuild the lost data through other means (i.e., pulling the data from alternate sources / applications / systems).
Summary
The cybersecurity threat landscapes are changing, and business continuity strategies need to adapt accordingly. This is where 11:11 Systems can assist with cyber focused business continuity planning. To learn more about comprehensive business continuity planning and other 11:11 cyber resilience services please take a look at these additional 11:11 resources:
Product Page: Business Continuity Planning
White Paper: Downtime is not an option
Customer Success Stories:
Tree Top simplifies business continuity strategy with 11:11 Systems and
Superior Credit Union transforms business continuity strategy with 11:11 Systems.
