Did you know that 90% of businesses fail if they don’t open back up quickly enough after a disaster? When it comes to meteorological events such as floods, hurricanes, storms, and wildfires, your business can become vulnerable to power blackouts, viruses, malware/ransomware and other digital targeted threats.
Threats from both directions are constant. There is the increasing threat from ransomware and malware on one hand, and the emergence of climate and energy-related phenomena on the other. These factors can both cause your business to fall off the rails and jeopardize future operations. Your Disaster Recovery Plan needs to be reviewed seriously. As more incidents impact IT production, the risks have increased.
Business activities are affected as a result of these incidents. With this in mind, the global economy is faced with increasing risks.
Here’s what you need to know about disaster recovery plans for your business:
- Difference Between CyberSecurity & DRP
- Layered Protection
- Recovery Phase
- Seek Consistent Improvement
- Track Recovery Metrics
Difference Between CyberSecurity & DRP
Ultimately, both plans are part of a larger security strategy aimed at ensuring your company’s systems and data assets remain confidential, intact, and available. The availability objectives of information security are directly tied to disaster recovery. Organizations, however, do not fully understand the nature of availability or the factors that influence it.
The majority of disaster recovery plans include a secondary location where data is replicated between the primary site and secondary site. If data gets corrupted by a cyberattack, DR will not protect the data, since it will be replicated at both locations. This can be prevented by using layered defenses, and you should build relevant controls into your risk management process.
Layered Protection
Furthermore, to make sure that your disaster recovery and cybersecurity efforts are successful, you’ll need advanced, layered protection. Include preventive elements such as firewalls with content inspection and antivirus to block vulnerabilities, exploits, and viruses as well as the addresses and ports. Also make sure to incorporate strict controls over software changes, access control, and audits of activities to prevent data and services from being compromised.
When it comes to layered protection, including applicative firewalling, local anti-virus, and malware protection on business service, computer and storage elements can protect against disaster downtime. Integrity and availability monitoring should also be used to detect issues as early as possible.
Recovery Phase
While it is preferable to avoid any form of cyber incident in the first place, prevention won’t always save the day. It is impossible to prevent some natural disasters or cyberattacks, so focusing only on prevention is ineffective. As a result, plan for all future cyber incidents, their containment, and recovery. With that in mind, you may want to begin by dissecting these priorities:
- Define responsibilities and roles for incident management teams
- Develop a cyber incident response plan and crisis management strategy with a business continuity plan
- If a downtime occurs, make sure there are communication channels
- Consider alternate data centers and services
- Consider recent cyber incidents affecting similar organizations in creating what-if scenarios
- Assess crisis planning gaps and correct them before a crisis occurs
- In addition, consider how personnel and stakeholders will be affected and the financial and legal repercussions of noncompliance
Seek Consistent Improvement
Be aware that the recovery planning process should be fluid when you prepare for the possibility of a cyber incident. In order for your organization to stay current on cybersecurity threats and risks, best practices, and lessons learned from response to breaches in similar companies, you should update your disaster recovery plan regularly. Create a task force to periodically test and evaluate your recovery efforts-and you’ll discover which strategies work and which do not. Whenever a breach occurs, gather your task force and find out what issues you will address in your future plans for improved results.
Track Recovery Metrics
When your business is confronted with a cyber incident, whether it’s a natural disaster or a cyber breach, instead of guessing whether the recovery process worked or not, use real data and specific metrics as proof. You may want to look for:
- Patch Policy Compliance
- Mean-Time to Patch
- Vulnerability Scan Coverage
- Percent of Systems Without Known Severe Vulnerabilities
- Information Security Budget as % of IT Budget
- Mean-Time to Incident Discovery
- Incident Rate
- Percentage of Incidents Detected
- Mean-Time Between Security Incidents
- Mean-Time to Mitigate Vulnerabilities and Recovery
You’re more likely to withstand a breach if you have adequate documentation and a comprehensive backup plan. Assign your disaster recovery plan to your continuity, security, and contingency planning teams as a playbook.