It’s a business owner’s worst nightmare: Everything seems to be going well for a long period of time, and then all of a sudden, a disaster (such as COVID-19) strikes, impacting your operations, your employees, and your customers. And you never know when your business, whether large or small, will become the victim of the next Cyberattacker.
But given how interconnected everything is today, indirect parties are impacted along with the business. Indirect parties may include your suppliers and distributors, shareholders, families, contractors, any external third parties that you outsource work to, your advisory board, and even the board of directors.
Depending upon the magnitude of the disaster, it could take an exceptionally long time to recover, and the need to come back to life as quickly as possible is, of course, of the utmost importance. But how does a business go about this? This is no easy task to accomplish, but the process begins before disaster strikes, with a carefully crafted Disaster Recovery (DR) plan that can be launched and executed in a matter of minutes.
With the totally new Cyberthreat Landscape of today, CIOs and CISOs are starting to better understand the importance of having a Disaster Recovery Plan.
How a Disaster Recovery Plan can benefit your company
Apart from quickly restoring your mission critical processes, a well-documented Disaster Recovery Plan has other numerous benefits to your business as well.
1) Greater cost efficiencies
Before you can begin creating a Disaster Recovery Plan, you must first complete what is known as a Business Impact Analysis, or “BIA” for short. It is defined as follows:
“A business impact analysis (BIA) is the process of determining the criticality of business activities and associated resource requirements to ensure operational resilience and continuity of operations during and after a business disruption. The BIA quantifies the impacts of disruptions on service delivery, risks to service delivery, and recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs). These recovery requirements are then used to develop strategies, solutions and plans.”
(SOURCE: 1).
In other words, you are mapping out those IT assets that are at risk if and when a Cyberattack actually occurs and quantifying that level of risk. From there, each risk should be categorized as:
- High Risk
- Medium Risk
- Low Risk.
By ascertaining this, you and your IT Security team will know which and how many resources should be dedicated to protecting the IT Assets that are at most risk. This results in an efficient spend of a tight IT budget.
2) You will have better control over scalability.
After completing your Business Impact Analysis (BIA) as previously described, you and your IT Security team will have a much greater understanding of the types of resources needed to protect them. Those resources will be based On Premises, in the Cloud, or a combination of both. Understanding your resources will provide your organization much greater scalability. For instance, you can quickly ramp up or ramp down your resources when an IT Asset changes a risk category. If a High Risk asset is downgraded to a Medium Risk, resources that were dedicated before can be scaled down to meet the new requirements very quickly. This flexibility will also help your organization realize greater cost efficiencies.
Conclusions
It’s clear that a carefully-crafted Disaster Recovery Plan has many benefits to a business at a time when cyberattacks are becoming more common and sophisticated. As we will explain in the next article, a solid Disaster Recovery Plan can also benefit the company’s employees and customers.
Source
1) https://www.gartner.com/it-glossary/bia-business-impact-analysis
Ravi Das is a Cybersecurity Consultant and Business Development Specialist. He also does Cybersecurity Consulting through his private practice, RaviDas Tech, Inc. He also possesses the Certified in Cybersecurity (CC) cert from the ISC2.
Visit his website at mltechnologies.io
