In the digital age, it has become more critical for organizations to collect data to improve their decisions in every aspect of the business. Given the value of companies’ and consumers’ data, it’s no surprise that hackers often target them to access these data. Regardless, as cyberattacks on businesses are currently on the rise, your business must be able to mitigate the risks and consequences of becoming a victim.
That said, one strategy worth considering is using Disaster Recovery and having a disaster recovery plan to mitigate the cybersecurity risks of your business. This is primarily because an expected outcome of cyberattacks is data loss and hardware damage. Disaster recovery helps you recover the data you lose in the event of a cyberattack, power outage, or natural disaster. Moreover, a disaster recovery plan will outline your company’s response to such disruptive occurrences and return to regular operation as soon as possible.
A disaster recovery plan or solution is a critical component of your cybersecurity measures. As such, it’s worth considering having external support such as IT support SLC Salt Lake or those that are locally available to help improve your solution once you’ve created it. That said, here are the steps for building your business’s disaster recovery solution:
- Build Your Team
When building a disaster recovery solution for your business, consider having a disaster response team. They’ll be responsible for the creation of your disaster recovery plan, its implementation, and revising it to ensure efficacy. They may also be responsible for disseminating information about the plan to the rest of the staff to ensure that everyone cooperates and understands their roles.
In assembling this team, also consider documenting this. In this document, you may list down the staff involved in the group, their roles, and who will lead in the event the current team lead is unavailable.
- Have A List Of All Your Assets
You have to list and document all the assets within your IT systems, such as servers, storage devices, etc. Alongside this, also consider creating a blueprint of your network infrastructure. This will help you note what needs to be recovered and rebuild your infrastructure.
- Conduct A Risk Assessment
Consider doing a risk assessment next. For this step, you’ll be going through the list you made in the previous step and identifying the internal and external threats to each of those assets. It might help to imagine the worst scenario and be thorough. Instances of these threats might be natural disasters, power outages, or others. After this, assess the probability of these issues occurring and their impact on your business. This will allow you to be more prepared and address those threats.
- Know And Understand Your Objectives
Consider defining and identifying your objectives. Your RTO and RPO help you know what’s important to recover first.
Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the length of time an application can be down before it begins to impact your organization negatively. This may differ for each application, with some only being allowed to crash for a few minutes while others can be down for hours or days.
On the other hand, Recovery Point Objective (RPO) tells how much data can be lost before your business operations are significantly interrupted. These two will help you prioritize which assets to recover first and which data must be backed up, as backing up every data can be very expensive.
- Choose Your Tools
Choose the tools that you’ll use in your disaster recovery plan. There’re plenty of tools available on the market right now, ranging from cloud services to disaster recovery as a service and more. The cost of these tools will depend on their recovery timeline, configuration complexity, and data storage capacity.
When choosing between these tools, you’ll have to choose between two kinds of solutions. One would have quick data recovery but result in some data loss. The other can maintain system availability but is expensive and complex.
- Have A Document Containing Your Plan
Then once you’ve accomplished all the steps listed above, consider having documentation of your entire plan. This includes having a checklist and documenting the process of implementing your plan. This document will contain the step-by-step instructions of your disaster recovery plan and would preferably be stored in the cloud.
This will allow you to remember what to do in a disaster and it’ll also help you communicate the protocols with the rest of your staff.
- Test, Evaluate, Revise
Once you’ve documented the entire process, it’ll be time to test, evaluate, and revise your plan. This allows you to see if your disaster recovery plan is effective. It’s best if you consider conducting these tests regularly.
After testing it, evaluate if specific processes can be done better and if it has errors that can be addressed. Once you’ve identified your plan’s flaws, simply revise it to improve it and make it more foolproof.
Conclusion
As the demand for data grows along with the use of IT systems in organizations, businesses are being targeted more by cybercriminals who breach their information systems. Often, this causes several issues such as data leaks, hardware damage, and data loss. Aside from cyberattacks, power interruptions and natural disasters may also lead to operations disruptions and system downtimes on top of the previously listed consequences.
As such, the importance of having a plan to mitigate these cybersecurity risks for your business is worth considering. Hopefully, the guide above has helped you improve your strategy for improving your cybersecurity strategies.
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