Cyber Recovery Considerations: How to Keep the Lights On

July 8, 2022

Key highlights:

• Cyberattacks are now an imminent reality for all organizations
• While commonly used business continuity programs focus on restoring backups, these strategies are not enough to protect business-critical assets during a cyberattack
• Optiv’s Cyber Recovery Solution is designed to help organizations recover their crown jewels securely so they can get operations back up and running while minimizing negative impact on the business

Part One of a series

Technology today is all about speed. Speed to innovate, speed to market and speed to fulfill consumer demand for instant gratification. Be it real time access to our financial accounts, on-demand viewing of our favorite TV show or even responding to work emails via our cell phone, the ability to access and use technology without delay fuels our lives.

But as an organization, what happens when technology fails and you suddenly can’t gain access to the systems, data and processes that drive your business? Most organizations have business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) plans in place that can implement a golden copy of their environment. But what if you experience a cyberattack?

The new, hard reality is that your organization will probably face a cyberattack at some point. Consumers’ ongoing demand for quick access to technology, information and entertainment has pushed the throttle on digital transformation initiatives. COVID-19 further accelerated DX in the business world, accelerating migrations of network perimeters to clouds, ushering in remote work and propagating an almost ubiquitous IoT attack surface.

According to recent research, only around 7% of all networks are considered secure from bad actors. Modern organizations are estimated to be hit with a ransomware attack every 11 seconds, and by 2031, that timeframe is predicted to drop to every 2 seconds as criminals continue to get craftier.

It’s Time to Move Beyond Business Continuity

Traditional BCDR plans aren’t enough to keep operations up and running in the event of a cyberattack. For example, a likely scenario during a ransomware attack is that you are locked out of your systems AND the ransomware infection is replicated across your backups as well. So how do you safely restore redundancies and get back to full operations?

Now’s the time to build a solution that reduces the likelihood of an attack happening in the first place, and when the inevitable happens, helps you rapidly recover to an operationally secure state.

Optiv’s Cyber Recovery Solution (CRS) helps companies build cyber resilience and get back to business faster. Supporting an enterprise where it stands, CRS works to proactively minimize security gaps while forging a steadfast ability to keep the lights on in the business, regardless of its potential disruptors. For one, this drives an evolution in business continuity. It also builds cyber resilience to weather and withstand the eventuality of attacks, a now-crucial consideration as threats like ransomware continue to advance in number and sophistication.

In the expeditious world of cybersecurity, there’s an emerging adage that you can’t protect what you can’t see. While this rings true, CRS furthers the notion by operating on the principle that you can’t protect the areas in your environment that you don’t understand. The process therefore identifies and maps the essential processes (as well as any of their interdependencies) across a given organization’s systems, applications and data. Realizing and documenting these mission- and business-critical assets and their relationships subsequently allows a business to align them with technology recovery. Leveraging Optiv’s extensive partner ecosystem, CRS supports the entire technology stack to match organizations with apt recovery capabilities (like cutting-edge, air-gapped backup solutions that isolate an organization’s most crucial assets from threats).

With visibility restored, CRS develops a customized and centralized platform that guides teams through technology and environment recovery procedures, informing them exactly how to pivot when an incident occurs. Lastly, built for sustainability, this comprehensive recovery strategy is tested continually to not only verify that it’s working, but that it’s working efficiently. This makes CRS a truly end-to-end solution to help businesses develop effective backup and recovery capabilities, address the gaps in their security programs and significantly reduce downtime when that inevitable day comes.

Regardless of whether or not Optiv CRS is right for your organization, building cyber resilience is quickly becoming a risk management necessity. Learn more about cyber resilience best practices and the benefits of CRS.