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Your business’ digital assets are a critical part of keeping your operations stable. These assets could include anything from the ERP software you use to unify your finance and business operations to CRM systems for your sales and marketing teams. You might even have a large amount of assets stored with third-party services or manage the majority of your infrastructure in the cloud.
All of these elements depend on stable functionality and data integrity. However, what happens if one of these core systems fails, or even worse, becomes compromised due to a cybersecurity incident? When those interruptions occur, they can create a significant ripple effect, impacting all parts of your operations.
To minimize these incidents from catching you off guard or happening altogether, there are some important strategies you should apply.
Carry Out Business Impact Analysis (BIA)
When you’re dealing with a potential high-impact IT issue, your first goal is to fully understand the scope of the problems you’re dealing with. This is where conducting business impact analysis (BIA) becomes critical.
Taking this approach forces you to take a deeper dive into all aspects of your operations and see how and what parts of your business might be affected when systems go down. This helps you identify whether the disruption is relatively minor or has much larger implications you’ll need to consider.
For example, a warehouse that experiences a barcode scanner malfunction can still operate using manual workflows. While these might slow down routine procedures, the issues are relatively isolated and shouldn’t have a significant impact.
However, in hospital settings, if a patient monitoring system were to go down, the severity of the situation would be much higher and would likely require immediate recovery initiatives to ensure patient health. Ranking these IT priorities accordingly helps the business to avoid wasting resources in the wrong areas.
Identify Specific Recovery Objectives
Once you’ve identified critical areas, you should focus your attention on putting benchmarks in place to help you keep your recovery efforts moving along.
The primary recovery metrics you should be tracking are your recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO).
Your RTO acts like a stopwatch during downtime and essentially dictates the maximum time a system can be offline before it critically impacts the business. Your RPO determines how much data loss the business can tolerate to continue normal business operations.
Ensure Your IT Systems Have Built-In Redundancy
You should always assume that when recovering your systems, things won’t go as smoothly as you hope. That is where building in redundancies into all your critical systems can be essential.
One of the first places you should look when creating redundancy initiatives is in your backups. When creating a backup strategy for core databases, following the “3-2-1 rule” is considered best practice. Following this strategy includes:
- Keeping three copies of your backup data
- Using two or more backup data formats
- Storing at least one copy in a remote site or database
Following this simple formula helps ensure that, even if one or more of your backups become compromised, you’ll be able to rely on another backup.
Test Your Recovery Plans Regularly
Building out a detailed recovery plan is important. However, if it’s just collecting dust on a shelf or buried in a database somewhere and is never reviewed, there’s a good chance it will fail in one place or another when the business actually needs it.
To avoid this from happening, regularly testing and improving your recovery plans over time is absolutely essential. All your teams should feel very familiar with their disaster recovery responsibilities and how to prioritize their efforts.
Tabletop exercises between red and blue teams are also a great way to test security teams’ responsiveness to potential cybersecurity breaches and can help to ensure the security protocols in place are adequate enough to handle modern threats. You could also involve external penetration testing services during this process to help give the business a fresh perspective on the potential security gaps that need to be addressed.
Make Cybersecurity an Important Part of Recovery Planning
The more technology your business relies on, the more potential points of failure there are. As such, your business should be protecting those systems from external threats. Cyber threats like ransomware are always a risk to consider when building recovery plans that may require additional cybersecurity steps.
When dealing with these added risks, you must have “immutable” backups in place. These are snapshots of your data that cannot be altered or deleted by anyone, including hackers with stolen admin credentials. This ensures you have a clean slate to restore from.
Additionally, your incident response and disaster recovery teams should be working from the same playbook. It’s essential to work with each of these teams to ensure they collaborate closely so that cybersecurity protocols become a critical element of disaster recovery planning.
Maintain Strict Governance and Disciplined Documentation
Keeping your business safe and operational isn’t just about the technical elements of your technology. There are also legal and ethical considerations to consider when evaluating the scope of the risks your business faces and measuring the business impact of broken systems.
Adopting frameworks like ISO 27001 or NIST guidelines can provide a structured template to ensure you meet all legal requirements when handling sensitive data and protecting your systems.
You should also schedule regular audits of any important recovery documentation you have in place. It’s important to keep in mind that as your business grows, personnel may come and go, and your software may get significant upgrades. If your recovery manual references a server you decommissioned two years ago, your recovery procedures will likely become obsolete.
Continue to Improve Your Disaster Preparedness
No matter how carefully you plan your business, disruptions will inevitably occur, and their severity will vary.
This is why preparing now for these situations is critical. Not only will you be able to minimize the impact that these disruptions (minor or major) have on your business, but you’ll be able to reduce the risk of sensitive data exposure and large non-compliance headaches down the road.
