One of the most empowering documents in an organization’s arsenal is its business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) plan. Sure, it lays out in detail everything bad that could happen to your business, but it also provides point-by-point strategies to respond to each of those threats.
Or does it? A good BCDR plan is a living document that evolves alongside the threats its organization faces. The trouble is that the world is changing fast, and BCDR teams are breathlessly trying to keep up. While it’s impossible to have a comprehensive inventory of every potential disruption, getting a handle on the broad strokes categories is a good plan.
When you know the “big picture” trends shaping the threats you face, you can arm yourself with the right tools to adapt. Here are the three battlegrounds modern BCDR plans should be prepared for.
Cyberattackers have their sights set on backups
Even if your backup technology does keep pace with the speed of your work, your organization faces a new problem: cyber attackers targeting backups. In the past, cyberattackers focused their energy on encrypting primary data sources and demanding a ransom. Backups posed a threat to that method. Now cybercriminals lay low in an organization’s network, careful not to trip any alarms until they have access to the backups as well. This way, organizations have no choice but to pay up.
Data generated faster than the speed of backups
Unplanned downtime costs 35% more per minute than planned downtime. But it’s not just lost money that causes organizations stress; it’s recovering all that data. The amount of time it takes to recover data can mean the difference between a minor inconvenience and a downright threat, to both reputation and revenue.
The traditional approach to dealing with this? Tape storage: a physical data storage method that is reliable and secure but hard to scale. Organizations are producing data faster than ever, and physical tape simply can’t keep up with the 181 zettabytes of data enterprises are projected to produce by 2025. Companies need a backup system that will not only keep pace with their rate of work but also rapidly recover workloads in the event of a breach.
The enterprise perimeter is going, going, gone
Finally, there’s no longer a clear boundary between “inside the organization” and “outside the organization.” At least, not from an IT perspective. Before, employees worked from assigned computers on company property. Today, employees work from personal devices using their home internet or a local coffee shop’s wifi. And the pre-cloud computing approach to securing these remote connections—utilizing a VPN—is not the cure-all that leaders wish they were.
But there is a way for organizations to augment existing BCDR plans with a new paradigm of security: the Zero Trust security framework, which is based on the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) standard.
Learn more about how the Zero Trust security framework, as utilized by Rubrik and Microsoft, helps conquer the three battlefields of modern BCDR in our latest eBook, The New Business Continuity: Enhancing BCDR with Zero Trust Data Security.