Business continuity is a critical aspect of any reliable IT security program. At the 2019 Siouxland Cybersecurity Forum, Xigent’s IT security education and networking event, Coley Burke, Zerto’s Vice President of Americas, spoke on the topic of strengthening cyber resilience plans.
Zerto is a recognized leader in IT security solutions and recommends that organizations approach disaster recovery and backup as a single product. This method refocuses IT on business goals.
In the early days of corporate IT, backup routines happened once a week, or maybe late every evening. As time went on, disaster recovery protocols made backup and recovery more embedded into day-to-day operations.
Today, however, advancing threats from ransomware and natural disasters are requiring even more robust and stable IT configurations. Organizations, especially those in the financial services industry, no longer have weeks to recover; they must resume activity immediately after an event.
Ransomware attacks are rising, and their impact is much more significant than even two years ago. According to Burke:
Many of the vulnerabilities to ransomware and other disasters come from the growing demand for digital transformation. The user experience must be fast, agile and connected; however, expanding an organization’s technology to satisfy these needs means opening a larger attack surface. IT departments must ensure cybersecurity resilience while scaling and transforming the organization.
Cyber resilience can present a massive challenge. It is very much like laying the track while the train is running or performing a heart transplant while the former heart keeps beating.
The ideal strategy is to reduce the risk of downtime and data loss with workload mobility via cloud adoption. The tactics require continuous disaster recovery and backup, infrastructure modernization, rigorous testing and development, and careful off-premise deployments.
When those tactics are synergized, and the IT managers and business managers are fully harmonized, the organization can face cyber threats with reliable resilience.
Cyber resilience is made possible by professionals who know the business case defines the use case of any IT system. They deliver resilient business continuity because they: