In our recent blog posts, we’ve been covering Cloud backup, business continuity and disaster recovery, but why is it so important right now?
It can be tempting to push them to the back of the pile, or if they are in place, effectiveness testing goes on the back burner, but they must take centre stage. This is especially prevalent given the rise in cybercrime since the pandemic.
The current landscape
The 2021 National Cyber Security Breaches survey states that just 33% per cent of businesses and 36% of charities have cyber security policies in place. It goes on to state that four in ten (42% and 40% respectively) reviewed these policies within the last six months.
The survey also takes into account the post pandemic workplace, with many more home workers and the obvious issues around security of sensitive business data when teams are not in the office and resources are stretched. The survey states;
‘The pandemic had stretched resources and led to competing priorities. In some cases, there was a perceived conflict between prioritising IT service continuity and maintenance work, and aspects of cyber security such as patching. A lack of time and personnel also made it harder to carry out cyber security training and awareness raising. While the resource bottlenecks had eased in some cases over the course of the pandemic, business continuity was typically considered to be the ongoing top priority for senior management. Alongside this, there was sometimes a lack of acknowledgement that cyber security could itself be a key enabler of business continuity.’
The last point is a particularly interesting one and something we’re trying to do more about at Cloud Heroes, often the key factors in ensuring business continuity are those that get side-lined or seen as low priority.
What do I need to consider?
When solutions such as VPN’s, data encryption and Cloud backup are deployed, as well as consistent staff education, the result lowers the risk of a disaster recovery plan having to be deployed. It also ensures business continuity plans are upheld, giving companies the best chance of preventing a data breach.
Similar to a castle with a moat and an army of soldiers protecting it from the battlements! The more layers of prevention and protection you add to your IT infrastructure not to mention awareness at user level of potential threats, the better chance your business has against an attack.
Your systems should be robust, simple and immutable. Immutability is a term that refers to your system and its ability to prevent any changes being made to an object after its creation. Your data should be a snapshot of any point in time should it need to be reinstated and every object should be accessible in order to restore it. You wouldn’t want it to recover a corrupted file for example.
Downtime is also a very important consideration, should the worst happen, how long will your business be out of action? It’s important to understand this and how it impacts your operations. If you regularly test your recovery processes and adapt them, you might even be able to reduce this over time.
Of course, there are always outside factors that can occur such as flooding, theft or damage to your physical infrastructure. In this case, you can lessen downtime with frequent cloud backups that have been subject to regular testing plus a robust business continuity plan that ensures you are back up and running within your specified time frame.
Next steps
If you would like to know more about designing your own business continuity plan, take a look at our article here. We’ve also written one on Cloud backup here.
Our friendly team are always happy to help and advise around all aspects of keeping your business running, there are many cost effective ways of protecting it. All we ask is please don’t wait for it to happen, we’ve seen far too many companies learn the hard way!