By Joe Noonan, General Manager Unitrends and Spanning
The cybercrime and hybrid work environments ignited by the pandemic have had a significant impact on how organizations protect and store data. Data resides in multiple places, and backups now need to protect data centers, endpoints, multiple clouds, and SaaS. More than ever, IT professionals must protect their organizations by incorporating a unified business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) plan into their cyber resilience strategy.
Cyber resilience is more than just firewalls and patches. It indicates how well an organization responds to cyberthreats, and in the case of attacks, includes strategies to plan, detect, defend, and respond to. There is also a clear process for recovery and business continuity.
It’s hard to find time for cyber resiliency planning when IT pros are juggling so many different responsibilities. But without the right strategy, it can be catastrophic for your organization.
Terms you need to know
When it comes to BCDR, there are two terms that guide cyber resilience strategies: Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO). RTO is the time it takes to bring your business back online. RPO represents the amount of data an organization can afford to lose in terms of time or amount of information. A bank’s RPO, for example, is close to zero because hundreds or thousands of transactions can occur immediately when the system goes down. Banks cannot afford to lose this information and it will be difficult to recover if their IT environment is not working. One way to think about RPOs is to have shorter RPOs that organizations should have because data is more difficult to recover or create from scratch. Once both RTO and RPO are established, you need to find an integrated BCDR tool.
What to look for in a solution
Cybercriminals are becoming more cunning, requiring backup and recovery. A successful backup can eliminate the impact of a cyberattack. Cybercriminals know this and look for alternative ways to disable, encrypt, and delete their backups. An efficient, integrated BCDR solution is not vulnerable as it is based on hardened Linux rather than Windows. Another way to defend against cybercriminals is to store external data in an immutable format.
And we have an innovative backup appliance that can protect your data wherever it goes. There are devices today that offer powerful data protection and fit right in your pocket! These solutions do not require server racks, making them ideal for small office settings or home offices. It is very quiet and comes with a software test recovery possibility built into the box. This ensures that your data is available whenever you need it.
AI that saves time
Organizations must find solutions that use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to identify suspicious activity and alert administrators before ransomware spreads. Among them, AI has several benefits that can help IT pros reduce time wasted on correcting false alerts and backups by up to 50%. AI-enabled assistants think the way technicians think and prioritize issues in the system that matter most, allowing real technicians to focus on what matters most.
Another thing to keep in mind when considering an integrated BCDR solution is to choose a tool with anti-phishing options to protect against credential compromise and account takeover attacks. People are the first line of defense, and a lack of security training can inadvertently put your organization at risk.
Effective tools maximize productivity.
An integrated BCDR solution should provide a single view of the entire data environment, eliminating the need for technicians to move between multiple systems. This saves time and reduces the margin for error. Another way BCDR tools can maximize productivity is through automation. Technicians can spend more than a quarter of their day monitoring, managing, and troubleshooting backups. Automated solutions proactively address common problems in backup environments, saving technicians time and protecting the environment, doing double duty.
Don’t let compliance fall through the cracks.
Some organizations operate in highly regulated industries that require data protection, such as government or healthcare. Irrespective of industry, most companies must adhere to compliance standards, especially if they want cyber insurance approvals. Part of your cyber resilience plan includes policies for data retention and automated backups to ensure compliance. Organizations should be prepared to properly store, archive, and recover compliance data as a precautionary measure.
BCDR solutions with automated disaster recovery (DR) testing capabilities also help enforce service level agreements (SLAs). This allows organizations to schedule time, specify which systems should be tested, and then handle it automatically. If the tests determine that the SLA cannot be completed, adjustments can be made and re-run the tests to verify that the changes have taken effect. This type of testing protects against unplanned downtime.
No matter where the data resides, an integrated BCDR solution can help IT professionals increase their organization’s cyber resilience, free up time to focus on more important tasks, meet compliance regulations and meet SLAs.
About the author
Joe Noonan is General Manager of Unitrends and Spanning. Joe has more than 18 years of experience providing hardware and software technology solutions for virtualization, cloud, data protection and disaster recovery. Since 2010, he has been leading the software product strategy for data protection, recovery automation, cloud disaster recovery and migration at Unitrends. Joe was also responsible for developing the technology alliance and is currently GM of Kaseya’s backup and DR suite, which includes Unitrends, Spanning and Kaseya branded backup solutions. can reach joe unitrends.com/contact.
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