3 Proactive Measures to Expedite Cybersecurity Incident Recovery

The types of disasters and their impacts on an organization and its business continuity are varied. In 2022, it is necessary to have a strategy that will minimize downtime and outages. Statista reported that in Q4 of 2021, the average length of interruption after ransomware attacks was 20 days. Can your organization afford 20 days of downtime?

Outages of any kind can result in the loss of data such as emails, financial data, client data, or company records. Not only can this lead to financial loss, but outages also present other threats such as reputational loss. Let’s dive into some steps your organization should implement to ensure a speedy recovery after a cyber incident occurs.

Build a Comprehensive BCDR Plan

What is a BCDR plan? Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) involves a set of plans implemented to minimize the downtime and overall risk that your organization may experience due to a cyber incident. Business Continuity plans focus on keeping your organization functioning during and after any incident, while Disaster Recovery plans mitigate the damage that can be caused by an incident. Time is of the essence when identifying a cyber incident, as the quicker your organization can eradicate it, the better it can do staving off bad actors.

In 2021, the Health Service Executive of Ireland suffered a major ransomware cyber incident, causing all its IT systems nationwide to be shut down. It took four months to complete recovery from the attack and during that time, several hospitals could not access electronic systems and records and had to rely on paper records. At the time of this incident, the HSE did not have:

• A single responsible owner for cybersecurity at the senior executive or management level
• A dedicated committee that provided direction and oversight of cybersecurity and the activities required to reduce the HSE’s cyber risk exposure
• A centralized cybersecurity function that managed cybersecurity risk and controls
• Or a documented cyber incident response plan

No matter the industry, your IT team should be establishing a comprehensive BCDR plan to minimize downtime and effectively recover from a cyber incident. You never know when you could be targeted.

Implement Extra Layers of Protection

Ransomware continues to be a significant threat across all industries. These attacks have become more sophisticated to the point where they will lie undetected in your network and corrupt your backup data to force ransom payment.

Technologies such as Dataprise’s proprietary Enhanced Data Protection essentially create a copy of your data that lives outside of your repository that your organization does not have access to. The reason that organizations do not have access to this set of data is that if you can access it, so can the malware, viruses, or ransomware that you are defending from.

EDP provides an extra layer of protection, and more importantly, can ensure a speedy recovery occurs from a cyber incident. If you would like to learn more about Enhanced Data Protection and Dataprise DRaaS, feel free to download our datasheet.

Test, Test, Test!

Lastly, one of the most under-discussed actions to ensure a speedy backup recovery is to make sure your team is constantly testing your backups. One analogy that our team uses is, in the wake of a fire, would you be satisfied if firefighters showed up to your house fire, never having practiced how to put out a fire? Or would you be more comfortable knowing that the firefighters practice different scenarios so that when they show up, they know what they are doing, and how to put out a fire quickly and effectively?

There are parallels here for your cyber team, as constantly practicing and running your company’s Incident Response Plan through tabletop exercises, can shed light on any security gaps you may have. When the time comes, your organization needs to be able to act quickly and decisively to mitigate risk.

One of the major themes of cybersecurity awareness month is that it is not if, it’s when your organization will be exposed to a cyber incident, no matter the industry. Being prepared and intentional can help your organization recover quickly and effectively. If you notice that you have any gaps when it comes to a speedy recovery, contact us to learn more about our DRaaS offerings.