Cloud adoption allows enterprises to create significant disruption in their business processes, resulting in cost savings and competitive advantages in customer experience and productivity. The balance of these advances is the broadening of the security plane in any given organization; there are many more endpoints and opportunities for a security breach. Enterprises are prioritizing business continuity with a focus on cyber resilience.
Creating a business continuity plan encompasses cyber resilience, as well as natural disasters. While these plans are often created with a worse case scenario in mind, as cyber threats become a daily challenge, they are executed in various ways on a more frequent basis.
There is also a growing intolerance for vulnerability to a security breach. Regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) from the European Union place heavy responsibility on business entities to build cyber resilience and report to customers if a breach has been discovered. It’s becoming imperative for companies to build a solid business continuity strategy in order to remove vulnerabilities and meet a growing body of global regulations.
In order for an organization to get started on a business continuity strategy, there are five basic steps:
Align business and IT: Using a common language to enact a business continuity strategy will enable divisions to work together, rather than the plan being considered strictly an IT project. As team members learn the role each one plays in business continuity preventative measures, it will become easier for employees to embrace the strategy.
Get buy-in from top executives: This step is important for creating a culture of support for business continuity measures, but it also helps in getting budgetary support. The importance of cyber resilience demands that sponsorship comes from the boardroom.
Assess the balance between risk and resilience: Organizations must understand their threat environment, which is unique for each company. Mitigating risk comes with a cost, and a business continuity plan must find the right balance.
Create a comprehensive cyber strategy that utilizes the appropriate applications, personnel and processes: Everyone in the company uses technology, and everyone must be involved, whether it’s at the evaluation and selection level, attending training, or adapting to a new process.
Develop a plan for protection, detection, response and recovery: No cyber resilience plan is foolproof, so it’s important to have a strategy for when a breach is detected. The strategy must be tested and practiced so that the organization can respond quickly when there’s a threat.
It’s important to note that the recovery from a security breach will never be solely a technological response. There are a variety of personnel and processes that will need to be in place for communication to reach key stakeholders, employees and the public, which requires a whole-organization approach to business continuity.
At Enterprise Visions, we help you leverage the right technology to build a business continuity plan that protects your enterprise. Contact us today for more information.