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The Crucial Role of Disaster Recovery in Cyber Resilience

Laptop with security shield

You’re already sick of hearing the statistics. 

The number of cyberattacks that occur every passing minute. How many new pieces of malware emerge with each passing day. How much more sophisticated, intelligent, and skilled hackers have become. 

How every business, no matter its industry or size, is a potential target for threat actors. 

These days, it’s much less a question of if your business will be the target of a cyberattack than it is a matter of when. In this climate, traditional cybersecurity measures are no longer sufficient. To protect your business’s data and assets, you need a new approach.

You need cyber resilience. 

What Exactly Is Cyber Resilience? 

Cyber resilience represents a new mindset about protecting your business and its assets. When a business adopts a cyber resilience strategy, it accepts that a data breach or disruptive incident is very likely inevitable. It shifts its focus from prevention to mitigation—to how it might limit the damage caused by threat actors and other disruptions. 

It’s important to note that cyber resilience is not a replacement for cybersecurity. Instead, the two should be viewed as two sides of the same coin. One side seeks to stop threat actors at the gates, while the other asks what happens when a threat actor inevitably gets past. 

How Cyber Resilience and Business Continuity Intersect

Business continuity is a crucial pillar of cyber resilience. It represents your business’s capacity to not only stay online during a disruptive event, but to recover lost data and restore lost infrastructure quickly. Without disaster recovery or business continuity in place, it matters very little what other measures you’ve incorporated to reduce impact and mitigate threats.

All a threat actor needs to do in order to cripple your business is to take one critical system offline.

With the right technology and processes in place from both a BC and DR perspective, though? You’ll be able to more effectively respond to and recover from anything an attacker throws at you.  Here’s what you’ll need as a starting point: 

  • Clearly assigned roles and responsibilities 
  • A chain of command that establishes who is the final decision-maker where recovery and remediation are concerned
  • Automated, air-gapped backups
  • Regular testing and evaluation
  • Failover for all critical infrastructure
  • A third-party communication tool to keep stakeholders connected during an incident
  • Detailed processes and plans for the various incidents your business might experience
  • A thorough risk assessment and business impact assessment

Stay Resilient, Stay Online

Basic cybersecurity used to be enough to keep your business safe. Disaster recovery and business continuity used to operate relatively independently of cyber threats. But times have changed.

In today’s landscape, however, continuity and recovery are cornerstones of every effective cyber resilience strategy.

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