SecOps Best Practices: Evolve Cyber Recovery to Shore Up Security Operations

October 08, 2024

Let’s say it is Monday morning, and even before your first sip of coffee, you find out that somebody on the network opened an email containing ransomware. Meanwhile, your SecOps have isolated the infection to stop its spread as the security operations center (SOC) manager begins investigations and forensic analysis.

 

You’ve heard about this happening to plenty of other companies, but you’re not panicking because you have backups readily available. You call your system administrator to start recovering data and applications. However, you realize that the drives have reached storage capacity, and no new data has been written to them for the past five weeks.

 

Thoughts flood in… how did this happen? Why were we a target? Weren’t we prepared for this?

 

Please accept our condolences if you’ve ever been in this scenario or one like it. Often, the most critical incidents occur when we’re least expecting them. Nonetheless, such situations are becoming increasingly common. Every day, businesses lose data or their ability to deliver core services due to ransomware, technological failures, environmental disasters and human error.

 

As it turns out, in 2024 70% of organizations experienced a significant or very significant disruption to business resulting from a breach and these breaches took an average of 73 days to contain. Time spent recovering data or functionality can be especially costly due to the need for resource allocation, performing investigations and potentially preparing notice to the public. In 2024, the average total cost of a ransomware breach was $4.91 million, a number that’s been churning steadily upward year over year.

 

Take a step back to look at the key drivers:

 

  • Attackers are getting more sophisticated.
  • The data traffic that SOCs ingest grows constantly and exponentially, often resulting in alert fatigue and security tool overload. These exacerbate the risk of unknown threats and malicious actors exploiting vulnerabilities and causing harm.
  • Legacy recovery plans have proven ineffective against new and improved cyberattack methods.

  • It’s challenging to determine which assets and data to prioritize in recovery when SecOps relies on numerous stakeholders across people, processes and technology

     

The good news is there’s a better way.

 

 

 

A Better Cyber Recovery Solution

What if you could build a framework, for instance, that continually honed your ability to recover operations to a secure state quickly? What if this framework also improved coordination across business units and security operations stakeholders? And what if it drove resilience throughout your people, processes and technology to overcome ransomware and other threats?

 

Optiv’s cyber recovery solution (CRS) was designed with these questions in mind. Our team of experts will establish security operations best practices by working alongside your SecOps team. CRS maps critical systems and applications in the environment to identify and prioritize assets based on their impact on business operations. These engagements reveal the crown jewels, singular to each organization, that must be protected to minimize disruption and keep the lights on.

 

By restoring visibility to these essential assets, aligning them with cutting-edge technology recovery and improving their resilience, CRS supports faster, more efficient capabilities across incident response and recovery. This resilient framework integrates security with associated governance procedures while creating customized recovery playbooks to accelerate the process of restoring business operations. Lastly, CRS helps align process owners across both business and technology units, effectively breaking down silos and hopefully, preventing a scenario like the one outlined at the beginning of this post.

 

 

 

Enhance Cyber Attack Recovery by Including Optiv CRS in Your SecOps Best Practices

Looking ahead, it’s all but certain that attackers will continue innovating new ways to breach businesses. To remain competitive despite an increasingly uncertain threat landscape, include a solution like CRS as part of your SecOps best practices, to enhance your attack recovery rate.

 

Because Optiv’s CRS implements a protected air-gapped backup of all your sensitive business data, it reduces the risk of data loss or corruption.

 

Talk to our experts today and lay the foundation for a resilient SecOps program.

 

 

Jessica Hetrick
By:
Jessica Hetrick
VP, Services | OPTIV + CLEARSHARK
Jessica is an accomplished senior cybersecurity business leader and practitioner with more than a decade of experience in services and security operations. She serves as the head of Services for Optiv + ClearShark, a cybersecurity and IT solutions provider focused exclusively on serving the U.S. federal government. In her role at Optiv + ClearShark, she is a member of Optiv’s operating leadership group and is responsible for building and providing best-in-class services capabilities for the U.S. public sector and the vendor community.

Optiv Security: Secure greatness.®

Optiv is the cyber advisory and solutions leader, delivering strategic and technical expertise to nearly 6,000 companies across every major industry. We partner with organizations to advise, deploy and operate complete cybersecurity programs from strategy and managed security services to risk, integration and technology solutions. With clients at the center of our unmatched ecosystem of people, products, partners and programs, we accelerate business progress like no other company can. At Optiv, we manage cyber risk so you can secure your full potential. For more information, visit www.optiv.com.

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