Regular data backups are one of the most important steps you can take to protect your business. But they’re not always enough on their own. Simply creating a few backups will not save you from a devastating cyber-attack or outage. They are one crucial piece of your overall cyber resilience strategy.
So what’s the rest of it? What else should you be doing to protect your operations, maintain customer trust, and defend your business against evolving threats?
The Looming Threat of Cyber-Attacks and Downtime
By now, most businesses have heard about the dangers of cyber-attack and outages. But they still regularly make the mistake of underestimating them, and it often costs them. These incidents are too-often treated as a hypothetical future and not a current, present threat.
The truth is that data breaches and outages occur every single day. Just last month, major airline Qantas fell victim to a large-scale ransomware attack that may have impacted up to 40 other companies. And the world is still reeling from the effects of a recent global AWS outage. These incidents will likely become more common, not less, as time passes.
But why? There are several factors driving this change:
- More Advanced Attacks: The constant march of advancing technology is a good thing for businesses, but it also benefits threat actors. They leverage these tools to create increasingly convincing scams and sophisticated attacks. Security is a game of catch-up that you will inevitably lose.
- Complex Infrastructure: As companies like Amazon continue to grow, their technological infrastructure becomes more complex. While this allows them to continuously improve their services, it also increases the likelihood of an error occurring. The more moving parts there are, the higher the risk becomes.
- Economical Concerns and Brain Drain: The best way to prevent these incidents from occurring is by hiring a skilled and experienced IT team. Unfortunately, many businesses are not able to maintain the number of staff needed. Between economic uncertainty and labour shortages, companies are slowly being deprived of the staff who would normally stop these problems from appearing. They are also less equipped to fix them in a timely manner.
A startling truth is quickly becoming clear: it is no longer enough to simply hope a breach or outage doesn’t occur. It will happen sooner or later. Your focus now must be on resilience.
What is Cyber Resilience?
Cyber resilience is your ability to continue operating even in the midst of an emergency, and resolve the problem quickly. It is broken into three main principles:
- Detection: identifying a potential threat early, so an effective response can be coordinated.
- Business Continuity Planning: Maintaining your operational capacity during and immediately after an incident
- Disaster Recovery: Restoring operations after they have been disrupted, resolving problems, and returning to normal.
Together, these pillars form the basis of a cyber resilience plan that will allow you to weather any storm.
How Cyber Resilience Protects Your Data
Preparing for the worst-case scenario is always important. If you do not plan for emergencies in advance, you risk a series of negative consequences:
- Data Loss:Sensitive information can be erased or stolen (for example, during a cyber-attack), disrupting operations and potentially taking months to fully restore.
- Financial Loss: Downtime, recovery, and poor customer experiences reduce your profitability over time.
- Downtime: Operations may be brought to a complete halt, possibly for hours or even days.
- Reputational Damage: As incidents continue to occur, your business begins to look unprofessional and untrustworthy. This will eventually make potential customers look elsewhere.
A comprehensive cyber resiliency strategy protects you from these negative outcomes, by limiting the damage an incident can cause and improving recovery times. It is especially important for preventing data loss. Data recovery is inherently reactive, and by the time you identify the problem it is often too late to prevent loss. Cyber resilience plans for this ahead of time, turning data protection into a proactive strategy that minimises loss.
Why You Can’t Rely on Backups Alone
Strong, immutable backups are a crucial part of cyber resilience. But they are not enough on their own. The reality is that backups fail more often than most business leaders want to believe. There are many reasons for this:
Outdated Equipment
Businesses often backup data to an old, barely functional hard drive and then move on. This is a big mistake. Outdated equipment is more likely to break down, and digital storage devices decay over time. The older your backup solution is, the more likely you are to lose anything stored within it.
Poor Practices
Arguably the most common cause of data loss is poor backup practices. This can take a variety of forms: failing to test restoration, only keeping one additional copy of data, or forgetting to backup at regular intervals are just some examples. Regardless of the specific human error involved, the end result is usually the same.
Ongoing Threats
Cyber threats can be far more insidious than you might expect, and if your backups could pay the price. If you accidentally restore data without realising that a threat is still active within your systems, then any backups you used in this process have been revealed and may be compromised.
Random Chance
Sometimes no one is at fault and a random accident is the reason your data vanishes. An example of this is cloud glitches, which occur relatively frequently even among major providers. You can never quite prepare for random chance, making it the most dangerous risk listed here.
Cyber resilience is about more than simply having a spare copy of data. You must also be able to trust that copy during an incident. That’s what the rest of your cyber resilience strategy is for. It helps protect the backups and maintain business continuity, so you can recover faster and with minimal disruptions.
Effective Cyber Security Resilience Strategies
Resilience in cyber security means building a multi-layered defence and response strategy. Here are some steps you can take right now to improve yours:
Credential Isolation
Most breaches occur because a password was leaked or stolen. This is the easiest way for threat actors to access sensitive accounts, especially as social engineering attacks become more sophisticated, and so they will attempt this first. Once they gain access to a single account, their next move will be to try those same credentials on everything else.
Different accounts should always use unique credentials. This is especially true between regular and backup data storage. Assume that any password could be breached at any moment, and plan accordingly.
Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
If account credentials are breached, MFA is your last opportunity to prevent threat actors from breaking in. For those unfamiliar, this is a security tool that requires a second form of identification before granting access to sensitive accounts. Even if a threat actor successfully steals a password, they will still be locked out if they cannot complete the request.
At a minimum, all backup storage should be secured with MFA. Ideally, every single account should be. The most secure method is biometric authentication, such as a face scan or fingerprint, but anything is better than leaving accounts unsecured.
Continuous Monitoring
Early detection is one of the most important things you can do to minimise damage during a cyber-attack. The faster you are able to identify potential threats, the easier it will be to take action. Systems should be monitored closely for any anomalies, and swift action must be taken when they are discovered.
Backup Testing
Just because you have backups available, that does not mean they will work during a real emergency. You must test them regularly, accounting for the conditions your business would be under. For instance, certain systems may be unavailable. If this would impact your ability to recover data, you need to know this in advance so a workaround can be developed.
Data Retention Policies
Data security is about more than just protecting what you plan to keep. Ultimately, information cannot be stolen if it doesn’t exist. Retention policies outline the period after which all data must be wiped from company systems, preventing it from being compromised. Develop, implement, and enforce them immediately.
Incident Response Planning
You might have a set of backups, and know that they work. But when will they be restored? Who is responsible? How will you ensure that the threat or outage is properly resolved before restoring sensitive information? If you can’t answer these questions, then you are not prepared to handle an incident.
This is why you need a thorough incident response plan in place. Sit down with your team and determine:
- What happens during an emergency
- Who is responsible
- When it will happen
- How communications will take place
Once you have completed this step, print copies to leave in easily accessible locations. Remember to test your incident response plan and ensure that it actually functions as required. Sometimes a solution doesn’t work as well as you expected it to, or a normally responsible staff member freezes under pressure. You will want to discover and address these issues early.
The Role of Strong Backups in Your Cyber Resilience Strategy
When used alongside the other strategies listed above, backups are a valuable cyber resilience solution. They allow you to recover faster, ensure operational continuity, and preserve your reputation with customers. But it is only effective when handled correctly. Simply having a backup does not necessarily mean your business is protected.
Strategies for Effective Backups
- Follow the 3-2-1 Rule: you should always keep at least three copies of all important data, on at least two different storage mediums, with one of these kept off-site or in the cloud. This significantly reduces the risk associated with random equipment failures or cloud outages, by ensuring that at least one copy is always available.
- Use Immutable Storage: Immutable backups cannot be altered once written, effectively making them tamper-proof. At least one of your stored copies should always be fully immutable.
- Automate Backups: Human error is a constant problem when attempting to maintain accurate backups. Employees may forget to back data up, or select the wrong version. By automating this process, you ensure that your business maintains continuous access to up-to-date backups.
- Monitor Daily: Backup management is a long-term commitment. You must monitor each day to ensure that information is being stored correctly, even when automation is involved.
- Test Regularly: Backups are worthless if they cannot be restored in your moment of need. Perform regular tests to make sure that the restoration process works as expected. Test under varying conditions (for example, removing one system), as it’s important to plan for the potential impact a threat or outage could have on your available resources.
- Set Strong Policies: Company policies are an important piece of the puzzle. Employees must know what is expected of them at all times. Focus on data retainment, backup and restoration procedures, and secure disposal.
- Hire a Backup Specialist: Backup experts can take care of management for you, removing the hassle and allowing you to focus on running the business. This is highly recommended.
Mistakes to Avoid
- Relying on a single backup. This does not create enough redundancy to ensure availability.
- Storing your “backups” in the same location as your main files. These are not true backups, and will not protect your data.
- Sharing credentials between staff or across accounts. This practice endangers your entire business, including your backups.
- Assuming that cloud platforms automatically protect your data. Errors are actually quite common, and can erase years’ worth of information.
What if Everything Goes Wrong?
You might find that in your moment of need, all of your carefully planned strategies fall apart. This is always a possibility, even if you have spent years preparing for an incident. If it happens, don’t panic. True cyber resilience is about your ability to respond when these worst-case scenarios do play out.
Follow these steps if you find that your recovery plan is ineffective:
- 1. Assess what went wrong. Which step of your cyber resiliency strategy fell apart? Why did this happen?
- 2. Identify the scope of the damage. How much data has been impacted? Are your backups safe?
- 3. Develop a plan to address the situation. Consider how you will mitigate further damage, remove the issue, and recover.
- 4. Communicate openly with staff, stakeholders, and customers about the situation. Explain what you are doing to solve the problem, and which data may be at risk.
- 5. Perform a post-mortem to discover what could have been done better, and update your cyber resilience strategy to account for this series of events.
- 6. Document everything, so that you’re prepared in the event of a compliance audit.
Backup Support That Builds Resilience
Backups are essential for your cyber resilience strategy, but they shouldn’t be the entire plan. Real resilience focuses on all three steps, from detection to recovery, and allows your business to bounce back from almost any threat. As attacks and outages become omnipresent, cyber resilience can make the difference between a minor issue and a serious risk to your future success.
Your backups might exist, but are they resilient? Cybersecure can make sure they are. We specialise in keeping your business data safe and accessible, whenever you need it. If you’d like to learn more, discover our long history of success helping businesses in various sectors.
FAQs
What is Cyber Resilience?
Cyber resilience (often referred to as “cyber security resilience”) represents your business’ ability to recover quickly and maintain operations during an incident. While it is mainly intended to protect you from cyber-attacks, it is also useful for recovering from random outages.
What’s the Difference Between Cyber Security and Cyber Resilience?
There is a small difference between cyber security and cyber resilience. Cyber security is your ability to prevent attacks, whereas cyber resilience is how well your business can survive them.
Aren’t Backups Already Resilient?
Your backups are not necessarily resilient. Common mistakes, such as not keeping enough copies or using the same credentials across accounts, can make them worthless during a real emergency. Backups must be made resilient using proper practices.
What Should I Include in a Comprehensive Cyber Resiliency Strategy?
Your cyber resiliency strategy should include incident response planning, MFA, credential isolation, strong backups, continuous monitoring, and regular testing.
Do I Need a Cyber Resilience Framework?
While you don’t need a cyber resilience framework, it can help keep you on track and ensure that nothing important is forgotten. You can also use security-focused guidelines, such as the NIST cybersecurity framework.