Don’t Let a Down-Time Get You Down
When it comes to cybersecurity, we all tend to focus on the potential damages as a result of a data breach can be quite devastating. Loss of data is a particularly big concern, especially in the GDPR era where this data loss could be very expensive for any company. The loss of data can lead to serious penalties and the threat of civil action if the necessary precautions have not been taken to secure the data. The infographic from EveryCloud below shows some of the the biggest breaches in the past..
So, you ensure that all your staff has had security awareness training, you’ve checked for weak spots and shored up your security. You create daily backups of all data so that you still have access to it even if the computer system goes up in smoke because you have backed up to an external storage (like one of the secure cloud services). You also have a data breach plan in place in case something does go wrong. That way, you and your employees will know exactly what to do in the case of a data breach.
You’re all set, right? Maybe, but maybe not.
Have you accounted for any downtime that the attack might cause? How will you be able to continue to conduct business as usual if you cannot access your system following and infection?
Downtime is the real Killer when your system is compromised – Always have a plan to get up and running again as quickly as possible
If you’re running a business like a data hosting site, downtime is a serious problem and may even be unrecoverable for the company if it goes on for too long.
In the case of smaller companies where a service is not provided to clients and there is not much user data to be concerned about, then the downtime could be reduced to nothing more than a blip in the radar. The problem may easily be solved if you have a back-up and maintenance plan and by some tightening down on security.
Hope for the best, plan for the worst.
The first thing you will need is the hardware to load the backup onto tin order to get up and running again as soon as possible. It is unlikely that the company will have the finances or time to purchase new or backup hardware that can be used to restore the system. However, there usually are short term solutions in the form of legacy hardware and staff computers that can be rolled out to get the systems running again while the problems are fixed.
The key is that by planning ahead, you can minimize one of the most damaging aspects of being breached – the downtime.
Additional Reading
Infographic published with permission from https://www.everycloud.