What Is Disaster Recovery Management?
Disaster recovery is a set of protocols and methods to restore IT functionality after a disaster. The ultimate goal is to minimize the damage of an incident so you can restore your business operations as quickly as possible. When your IT infrastructure goes down, your business will be greatly disrupted. The longer it takes to get back up and running, the more it’ll cost.
Having a risk mitigation plan plan reduces the financial and reputational damage to your business. For instance, a disaster recovery plan usually includes scheduled backups, a plan to restore data, and end-to-end encryption for sensitive data.
What Is Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery?
Cloud-based disaster recovery protects your IT infrastructure in the cloud. This is critical for every business that operates to any degree in the cloud, whether it’s with on-premises infrastructure or third-party services.
Cloud providers are often targeted by cybercriminals and are not immune to being hacked. The problem is that most cyberattacks are caused by human error, like database misconfigurations, which makes cloud attacks unfortunately common.
The Cost of Not Creating Risk Mitigation Strategies
When you’re caught off-guard by a data disaster, the impact can be devastating. You can lose important data, get fined by governing bodies for a data breach, and lose the trust of your shareholders and customers. You will also be facing serious compliance risks. If you get hit with a ransomware attack and you haven’t backed up your data, you could go out of business.
The cost of a data breach can average between $35,730 and $15.6 million. Governing agencies take these incidents seriously and won’t hesitate to fine a business that violates data protection laws.
In addition to fines, the longer your company remains offline, the more revenue you’ll lose. You’ll also see a loss of employee productivity, and if you’re paying people on salary, your payroll dollars will go to waste.
If you’re looking into working with a partner to develop risk mitigation strategies, check out more about outsourced IT services from Reverus today.
Create a Risk Mitigation Plan for Your Business
Risk mitigation will minimize the impact of a cloud disaster on your business. With a solid plan, you can reduce downtime, avoid regulatory fines, restore lost data, and resume operating as usual to preserve your revenue.
Not sure where to start? Here are four important risk mitigation strategies that will help you protect your business.
1. Evaluate Your Risks
The first step to mitigating risk is to identify your risks. Where is your business vulnerable?
Most businesses share a handful of vulnerabilities, including:
- Insider threats
- Phishing and spear-phishing attacks
- Viruses, worms, and malware
- Ransomware attacks
- Data breaches
- Stolen personal devices
- Exposed data
- Remote employees that put the network at risk
If you use cloud services, you also need to be aware of the potential risks to your account through misconfigured databases and servers. If you didn’t have an IT security pro set up your account, your risk of being attacked is probably higher than normal.
Work with a cybersecurity professional to go over the risks specific to your business. You’ll need this list to create customized solutions.
2. Implement Policies And Risk Mitigation Strategies.
Once you know where your vulnerabilities are, you can implement solutions to prevent and mitigate the potential impact of cybersecurity incidents. For instance, you might decide to encrypt sensitive customer data on your server to prevent it from being read if it gets stolen.
Encryption is one of the most effective ways to avoid having to pay fines for violating data privacy regulations. You can’t always prevent data from being stolen, but stolen data can’t be read when it’s encrypted, which means you probably won’t be fined for an incident.
With the GDPR, for example, authorities may not even consider it a data breach if the stolen data is encrypted. The point of imposing punitive fines is to discourage companies from being careless with personal data that can cause harm when stolen. Encryption prevents that harm.
3. Create A Data Backup And Restoration Plan.
Data backup and recovery is central to every disaster recovery plan. Whether you experience a natural disaster or a ransomware attack, the end result is the same without a secure backup: data is often unrecoverable.
Identify what data needs to be backed up and how often. For instance, if you update data daily, you’ll need to create daily backups. Don’t let too much time go by between backups, because if you ever need to restore your data after a disaster, you’ll need to redo the work you didn’t save.
Don’t Just Rely On One Backup Source.
It’s critical to ensure that you have multiple backups. Most businesses have a cloud-based backup account, but you’ll also want an offline data backup method to prevent your digital resources from being accessible to hackers. Anything plugged into a computer connected to the internet is vulnerable, including external hard drives. Offline backups should be disconnected from the internet as soon as they’re completed.
Remember To Back Up Your Databases.
Make sure to back up all of your data, including the contents of your website and your databases. You’ll need to create these backups from different places, which might require IT assistance since you can’t just download databases from your website’s file manager.
In addition to creating regular backups, you need a plan for restoring your data. Data is useless if it can’t be restored properly. Do some test runs to make sure your entire backup and restoration plan works.
Hire Reverus for Managed IT Services in Charlotte
Don’t have an internal IT security team? No problem! Working with a managed IT provider is the best protection you can get for your business. At Reverus, our managed IT services will provide you with everything you need to keep your business secure in the cloud.
We offer everything from network management to data backups and 24/7 remote monitoring. Contact us today to learn more about our risk mitigation strategies.
