Evaluate Your Business
Just how much downtime could your company endure and yet survive? Do you have critical services that customers depend on that need to be always on? Do you need a backup network immediately available? How quickly do you need to be able to recover your data?
These are some of the questions you need to ask yourself when you start to think about Incident Recovery. Most businesses would not survive a few days before they went bankrupt.
"These are some of the questions you need to ask yourself when you start to think about Incident Recovery. Most businesses would not survive a few days before they went bankrupt."
Create A Data Recovery Plan
We all know we should have data backups, but far too many organizations don’t have a dependable backup plan and solution. Any data recovery solution needs to plan for recovery of both local and cloud-stored data.
Local Data
All the data stored on various computers needs to be evaluated for backup requirements. Once a backup plan is created, the next important step is to test recovery based on that backup plan. It is far too common for backups to be regularly created, only to discover upon attempted recovery that some key file is missing. Plan, and then test your plan
Cloud Data
Cloud providers come under attack, go broke, or otherwise have system failures. It is also possible for your cloud data to be unavailable because of a legal action from some government, even if that legal action isn’t directed against you. Plus, internet access can fail which will limit the accessibility of your cloud stored data. We recommend that you plan for a backup of all cloud stored data.
Create A Network Recovery Plan
You also need to consider your plans in case your network is unusable. Do you need to rent an alternative network as a backup? Could much of your processing move to a cloud provider like Microsoft Azure? Or do you have enough leeway that you could wait for a vendor to provide new equipment? These questions need to be settled before an emergency.
When To Involve Legal
Perhaps one of the trickier questions to consider is what your legal liabilities are in the event of a data breach. Do you have customers in the European Union or one of the states with stricter breach notification laws? Do you handle Personally Identifiable Information (PII)? If so, how would you handle a loss of customer PII? Do you have contracts with customers that would be affected in a network breach? What are the legal requirements in your jurisdiction? And do you want to get law enforcement involved in any breach? These questions are important to consider before an emergency arises and should be determined in coordination with your legal team.
What's The Risk In Not Having A Plan
The risk of a cybersecurity event is just a normal part of business today. Because of that risk, it would be wise to consider cybersecurity insurance. A number of companies provide policies in this realm. We prefer a policy that includes resources to help the business recover from a cyber event as well as provides coverage for any customer or client losses. We know that this whole process can seem pretty overwhelming. Feel free to contact us so we can help your business create a plan to withstand cybersecurity incidents.
Practical Cybersecurity Webinars:Series 2 Starts November 14, 2024!
Learn practical information your business or organization can put to use to improve your cybersecurity stance with the short, monthly webinars.
- Preparing for Insider Threats
- Easy Policy Management
- Intro to Microsoft Copilot
- What’s Included with Microsoft 365
- Get Ready for Windows 11
- Getting Your “Digital Clouds” Under Control
Registration is FREE!
