The figures are appalling – 60% of small businesses fail within six months of a cyber-attack.
Cyber attackers are all around us, and they leave devastating scars. Modern enterprises are hit by nascent attacks, disrupt operations, leach valuable information, and destroy trust on a scale that can’t be recovered.
Most organizations we’ve dealt with have been unable to recover after an attack. All of them had the same message: “We could have prepared better”. Your business continuity isn’t just a piece of paper – it’s your kit for when digital shockwaves strike.
In this article, we will give you a step-by-step guide to design and implement a business continuity plan (BCP) that works. These blueprints proved to be valuable tools that decreased downtime, saved costs and maintained customer trust in cyber-attacks.
We will give you a plan in detail how to safeguard your business against hacking. Keep in mind – not if you get attacked, but when.
What Is Business Continuity for Cyber Security?
Cyber-crime of every scale is growing at an ever-greater rate in the modern digital era. Your business is owed an effective cyber security business continuity plan.
Key Components of a Cyber Security BCP
There are several key components to a full-blown cyber security BCP that combine to offer functional resilience. It’s those fundamental pieces that distinguish:
- Risk Assessment Toolkit: Review risks and weaknesses.
- Data Protection Security: Use high-level backup and recovery mechanisms.
- Incident Response Process: Determine appropriate steps for breach remediation.
- Communication Plan: Establish processes for stakeholder communication.
- Recovery Workflows: Design comprehensive system recovery workflows.
Common Threats and Vulnerabilities
Cyberattacks with advanced functionality are escalating rapidly. Ransomware is no longer funny – new targets appear every 14 seconds. Endpoint attacks increased with remote work policies and “bring your own device” policies. Google, Office 365 and other cloud providers are the main victims for phishing attacks from the cybercriminals.
Regulatory Requirements and Compliance
Compliance determines business survival. Banks are bound by FINRA. Healthcare companies have to comply with HIPAA, or pay a fine of up to $50,000 per violation. Every year, new hardware, software and third-party vulnerabilities are evaluated for. These tests help keep your BCP up to date with the regulatory requirements.
The cybersecurity landscape continues to evolve rapidly. Companies should be proactive with BCPs. Ongoing monitoring and review keep your plan updated with emerging threats and compliance standards.
Conducting a Comprehensive Risk Assessment
A risk analysis of every level is the bloodstream of a robust business continuity cyber security plan. So let’s feast on the process for assessing and tackling cyber risks.
Identifying Critical Business Assets
You need to catalogue the company’s most valuable assets first. This is the point where most companies leave important parts out. These assets often need to be identified:
- Business critical applications and databases
- Financial and customer information/reporting.
- Intellectual property and trade secrets.
- Network infrastructure and security infrastructure.
- Third-party vendor access points
Analyzing Potential Risks of Cyber Threats
Managing risks is an organized process that includes short- and long-term impact. We also found that the average data breach cost in 2023 was $4.45 million. This makes this action crucial to your BCP in cyber security.
- Review financial implications
- Assess operational disruption potential
- Think over reputational damage
- Review regulatory compliance risks
- Measure recovery time objectives
Creating Risk Mitigation Strategies
You need mitigation techniques for cyber incidents. The key is to use preventative controls with detective protection. You need to develop an in-depth system recovery plan that preserves sensitive data and settings.
Proactive action via continual monitoring and mitigation techniques are most effective. This entails leveraging multi-sourced threat reputation services and resilient backups. Testing and refining recovery plans constantly keep them up to date with new threats.
An enterprise management platform that’s in action enables your company to keep pace with evolving threat landscapes while automating administrative processes. Your risk management program must be updated at least every two years to maintain validity.
Developing Response and Recovery Procedures
Quick response time will save organizations during cyber incidents. Good preparation can mean the difference of minutes in a time of crisis. Companies that have an incident response team and exercise their plans regularly save $2.66 million on average per breach.
Creating Incident Response Teams
Your business requires a separate incident response team with defined functions. The structure has:
- Technical Lead: Responsible for containment and recovery operations.
- Communications Manager: Responsible for stakeholder communication.
- Legal Consultant: Monitors compliance with laws and regulations.
- Security Analysts: Disaggregate and report incidents.
- Recovery Experts: Perform system restoration.
Establishing Communication Protocols
A transparent dialogue puts you in charge when the cyber incident hits. Our model creates clear pathways between internal and external stakeholders. Easily reach all team members through a central communications center with access to emergency contacts, notification templates and escalation routes.
Your BCP must include contingency communication in case the primary channels are interrupted.
Designing Recovery Workflows
You need to ensure that the recovery is low impact and secure. You need to develop a path that takes critical systems at the front of the line, based on results of the risk assessment. The average company takes 277 days to discover and isolate a breach. This time can be drastically reduced using the proper workflows.
First there is the mitigation plan, and then there’s a protocol for recovery. Your BCP needs Recovery manuals, test protocols, and metrics for success. In regular simulations, teams are always prepared and know where workflows can be improved.
Don’t forget that incident response requires more than just technical remedies — it requires collaboration and communication. You need to stay up to date by monitoring emerging risks and studying incidents.
Implementing Testing and Training Programs
The most critical parts of any cyber security business continuity strategy are testing and training. We found that the more frequent tests, the better their recovery rate after a cyber-attack.
Conducting Regular BCP Testing Exercises
The fastest test implementation brings together a bunch of approaches. Here’s our recommended testing framework:
- Tabletop Exercises: Business discussions that reenact cyber-attacks.
- Functional Training: Restore specific systemic systems with targeted training.
- Large-Scale Exercises: Full testing of all BCP modules.
- Strictly Limited Tests: Limited testing of high value processes.
Your organization needs to conduct these exercises at least twice a year with critical systems demanding more frequently. From our statistics, we find 57% of organizations now test quarterly which vastly increases incident management capabilities.
Employee Training and Awareness
You need to develop a complete training program to transform employees into active guardians rather than potential attackers. Everything in the approach is focused on:
- Security awareness fundamentals
- Recognition of phishing and social engineering attacks.
- Incident reporting procedures
- Safe browsing and email practices
- Mobile device security protocols
By providing regular training, employee-caused security incidents have greatly decreased. After our customers adopt our training courses, they witness up to 70% lower phishing attempts.
Measuring and Improving Effectiveness
You need to use monitoring tools to help you evaluate the performance of BCP on cyber security. You need to collect metrics such as recovery time goals (RTOs), incident rates, and training program participation from employees.
Organizations that perform routine exercises reduce incident recovery time by 35%. You also need to write robust reports on all tests that reflect strengths and areas for growth.
Core team reports metrics quarterly and adjusts training and testing schedules to suit requirements. This one-step strategy makes your business continuity strategy flexible and adaptable as cyber threats evolve.
Conclusion
Organizations are spared catastrophic cyber-attacks by business continuity plans. This article will show you how to create a robust cyber security platform. The process includes risk assessment, team structure, testing and training courses.
Organizations with well-planned BCPs recover faster from cyber-attacks. They are also disproportionately less expensive to run. The speedy healing relies on periodic testing, employee education and open communication channels. This is true according to the statistics – with verified BCPs, companies save millions of dollars when a breach happens and accelerate their recovery by up to 35%.
Cyber security threats keep changing. Your BCP must adapt with them to support your business. Take action now. Experiment and practice with your employees regularly. Your business is in danger only if you have a cyber security business continuity plan in place.
About the Author
Alan Chen is the President and CEO of DataNumen, a leading data recovery company founded in 2001. The company provides recovery solutions for Outlook, Word, Excel, PDF, databases, and images. Their clients include global giants like IBM, Intel, Cisco, Microsoft, General Electric, Xerox, and Oracle. Alan can be reached online at [email protected] and at our company website https://www.datanumen.com/
