No matter what steps you take to protect your business from disruption, something will eventually go wrong. Problems can come in many forms – the key is how you respond.
‘Business continuity’ is a phrase that gets thrown around a lot in terms of organisational strategy and disaster planning. But what does this term actually mean?
What is business continuity?
In its simplest terms, business continuity is a company’s ability to sustain critical operations during periods of disruption. This goal can be broken down into two main elements: maintaining essential functions and minimising downtime for impacted areas.
Essential functions that need to be maintained during periods of adversity might include customer service, financial transactions, and core IT infrastructure. Minimising downtime, meanwhile, focuses on recovery. This could involve deploying failover systems, implementing incident response protocols, and testing recovery processes.
What is business continuity planning?
You can’t protect business continuity without business continuity planning (BCP). This process entails proactive risk assessment and strategic development to prepare for worst-case scenarios. BCP should encompass how disruption will impact services, employees, and customers to ensure each branch remains as unaffected as possible.
BCP covers a range of potential risks, including:
- Natural disasters: Earthquakes and hurricanes may not be realistic threats depending on where you’re based, but fires and flooding almost certainly will be.
- Supply chain disruption: Your business may not be at risk of earthquakes or hurricanes, but what about your suppliers… or their suppliers?
- Power or network outage: A grid goes down, knocking out your internet connection or preventing you from accessing cloud applications. What do you do?
- Cyberattacks and data breaches: Ransomware, phishing scams, DDoS attacks – the list is only growing.
- Pandemics and health crises: Yeah, but that would never actually happen, right?
A well-developed BCP takes all these factors into account, and more.
Business continuity and cyber resilience
Today, every business is a digital business. Cyber threats have become the most widespread and sophisticated forms of disruption to business operations around the world. These threats transcend physical presence, geographical boundaries, and the sector in which you operate. No organisation is immune.
Cyber resilience covers your ability to anticipate, withstand, and recover from cyber threats. It differs from cyber security in that the latter only covers the prevention part. Once attackers have breached your defences or an internal issue develops, you’re on your own. But you don’t have to be.
How to implement cyber resilience
Integrating cyber resilience into your BCP is the only way to protect your organisation from the risks of the digital landscape and ensure business continuity – even if your systems are compromised. Time is money, and downtime equals lost revenue.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
- Risk Assessment and Threat Modelling: The first step in your cyber resilience journey is to identify vulnerabilities and potential cyber threats. This process will allow you to assess business-critical assets and determine their risk exposure.
- Data backup and recovery: Backing up your data and making those backups immutable should go hand in hand. The first step ensures you have exact copies of your files in the event of data loss or theft; the second protects those backups from hackers. Data should also be stored off-site and in cloud environments to maximise its security.
- Incident response planning: Once you have your data backed up, your next job is to establish communication protocols to inform stakeholders in the event of an incident. Conducting regular drills will increase the chances of a fast and effective response.
- Endpoint security and threat monitoring: Advanced threat detection systems can identify attacks in real time. AI-driven monitoring is becoming increasingly common to detect suspicious behaviour.
- Zero trust security model: Implementing strict access controls can help to slow attackers down in the event of a security breach. By requiring multi-factor authentication and continuously verifying identities and permissions within the network, you can place obstacles in front of hackers to stop them running wild within your systems.
- Employee awareness training: With phishing attacks becoming more common, regular cybersecurity training can help workers identify suspicious messages. Running simulated cyberattacks will also test how prepared employees are in the event of the real thing.
Build cyber resilience with Redstor
In business, trust is hard to gain and easy to lose. Companies that demonstrate cyber resilience protect not just their data but also their reputation. Redstor can keep you protected:
- InstantData™ recovery gives you access to your files in seconds, even before full recovery is complete.
- Immutable backups stop ransomware attackers from altering, encrypting, or deleting your data.
- Backup threat detectionidentifies threats within your backups before they take hold, reducing risk and protecting critical data.
- On-prem and cloud-based backupfor Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Azure VMs, and infrastructure – we’ve got you covered.
Don’t let cyber attackers have the last word. Get in touch today to build a BCP tailored to your business continuity needs.