The FBI reported that over 800,000 cybercrime-related complaints were filed in 2022, resulting in losses exceeding $10 billion, according to the bureau’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3). One major security breach in recent years compromised customers’ social security numbers, banking information, and other personal data.
IT resilience planning involves preparing an organization’s IT infrastructure to withstand and quickly recover from disruptions such as cyberattacks, natural disasters, and hardware failures. This ensures that IT systems and data remain secure and intact. IT resilience planning is crucial for business continuity, as it streamlines uninterrupted and proactive operations, maintaining the organization’s functionality.
Key benefits of a strong IT resilience plan include:
- Reduced downtime and financial loss
- Improved customer confidence
- Maintenance of critical functions and services
- Enhanced reputation stability
The Threat Landscape
In the face of various disruptions, the future of businesses is as stressful as ever. These discrepancies can significantly impact their IT infrastructure and operations.
Some of the major types of disruptions are:
Cyberattacks
Ransomware, phishing, DDoS, and other attacks affect IT infrastructure and systems by destroying data and stealing sensitive and private information. In turn, the fallacies lead to data breaches, financial failures and losses, loss of customer trust, time consumption for setting up new systems and operations, etc.
Natural Disasters
Physical damage is as significant as digital damage. Earthquakes, floods, fires and hurricanes could damage hardware and destroy communication and power lines. This stops any business activities and requires repair and maintenance.
Power Outages
Power outages disrupt all IT operations, affecting productivity transactions and enabling breaches.
Human error
Employees are responsible for operational disruptions that can be costly and require long recovery times, data restoration and system reconfiguration.
Building Your IT Resilience Plan
When building your IT resilience plan there are three clear steps to follow.
Step 1: Conduct a Business Impact Analysis (BIA)
What is a BIA?
A Business Impact Analysis (BIA) is a process that identifies and evaluates the effects of disruptions on critical business operations. The goal of BIA is to identify and highlight detrimental business functions and their dependencies on IT systems, and to determine how these potential disruptions impact the organization as a whole.
Some Example Questions to Guide the BIA Process:
- What are the most critical business functions in your organization?
- Which IT systems support these functions?
- What is the result of a disruption of the system for 5 hours?
- How severe is the financial and operational impact in case of an IT system outage?
- What are your backup/recovery measures?
Step 2: Develop Recovery Strategies
Recovery Time Objective (RTO)
RTO is the maximum acceptable amount of time a business process can be down after a disruption before suffering catastrophic consequences. RTO gives an estimate as to how effectively the IT system is to be restored.
Recovery Point Objective (RPO)
RPO is the maximum acceptable amount of data loss measured in time. RPO defines the point in time when data must be retrieved and recovered to resume business operations after a disruption.
Different recovery strategies for various IT systems and data
- Disaster recovery. Disaster recovery is the ability to recover from an unforeseen disruption that impacts normal business operations. DR (Disaster Recovery) planning helps businesses protect critical data and restore normal operations in a timely manner.
- Failover/failback. Failover is a procedure where businesses move valuable data to a secondary system when a primary one fails. Failback is an operation where processes are switched back to the original system when the threat has been averted or removed.
- Virtualized recovery plans. An on-demand software as a service (SaaS) that relies on virtual machine instances that are ready to operate immediately upon a disruption of an original system. They provide recovery by taking on workloads without failure.
- Redundancy. Applying redundant systems to provide failover if it comes to hardware or software disruption.
Step 3: Implement & Test the Plan
Documented Procedures
Before you can test the recovery plan conducted from the previous bullet points, you need to implement and document the protocols. This should be done concisely and thoroughly, where all scenarios and outcomes are meticulously detected. It is highly recommended to include a checklist for critical tasks as well.
Clear Roles & Responsibilities
Task delegation should be one of your top priorities. If you want a synergized team and open cooperation, you should define specific roles and responsibilities for all team members involved in the IT resilience plan. A clear chain of command is half the work.
Employee Training
Employees must be familiarized with all aspects of the IT resilience plan in order to conduct it successfully. The training should contain backup systems, emergency procedures and communication protocols.
Regular Testing
In order to make something second nature, you need to practice it regularly. Testing of the IT resilience plan will make it more effective and productive. This can be done with simulated disruptions, frequent updates and reviews as well as performance assessments.
Additional Considerations
- Cloud-based disaster recovery. Cloud-based disaster recovery is a method of backing up and restoring businesses’ critical data and applications through cloud resources. More frequently than not, companies opt to keep copies of their critical data on the cloud, which is more secure and ensures quick recovery in case of disruption or disaster.
- Importance of risk assessment and updates. Ongoing risk assessment helps identify new threats, estimate current controls, resource prioritization and adapt to changes.
Key Takeaways
IT resilience planning prepares IT infrastructure for recovery and reparation in case of disruptions like cyberattacks, natural disasters, power outages and human errors.
It is necessary to conduct a BIA (Business Impact Analysis) to identify critical functions and apply recovery strategies such as failover, failback, redundancy, disaster recovery, and virtualized recovery plans. Solidifying roles and responsibilities, including employee training, regular testing and documenting procedures, are strategies that will help with IT resilience planning, which, in turn, minimizes downtime and protects critical data.
Minimize downtime and ensure business continuity with a customized IT disaster recovery plan. Let our IT experts help you develop a strategy to keep your operations running smoothly, no matter what. Contact us for your free consultation today!