7 Cybersecurity Tips

For today’s enterprise, the question is not whether you will be attacked. It’s when, by what, and how badly your company’s reputation or finances will be damaged. A Disaster Recovery Plan is key.

Here are 7 Tips for Disaster Recovery Planning:

#1 Ensure your Disaster Recovery plan matches your business requirements for risk and financial impact.

• Agree on which IT systems are most critical for business operations
• Know your applications and know your I.T. team
• Develop a clear and shared incident response and recovery plan
• Communication (both internal and external) and a reliable notification system is key

#2 Test your Disaster Recovery process for: Resources, Functionality, and Scalability. Recover and Run are two different realities. There is a difference between recovering an application and recovering it to an acceptable service level. Is the recovery site configuration and network connectivity equivalent to the primary one? What will be the effect of a different degree of compute disk performance network? Will there be the same mix of applications on recovery site servers as in the primary data center?

#3 Do your backups – all of them! A proper backup strategy that balances space, performance, and protection is key.

#4 Replication does not replace backup. Backup as a Service (BUaaS) is important, but don’t confuse it with Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS). There are distinct differences: BUaaS allows you to retrieve data, whereas DRaaS allows you to recover your data, recover your operations, and allows you to continue to do business.

#5 Create an air gap in your backup architecture. Don’t house all your backups in the same network or store and restrict administrative access. Also, consider tape or other media solutions for backup, network considerations, data separation, and isolation.

#6 Make sure to address legacy applications and operating systems. Security risks of legacy software include:

• Little to no vendor support
• New vulnerabilities may not get patched
• Weaknesses get widely published
• Designed when the landscape was less advanced

#7 Deploy an alternate active directory server for disaster recovery. This will make recovery of a Microsoft environment easier and faster.

Keep your system safe with Mid-Range Managed Security services, set up an annual risk assessment, and company-wide security training.