No organisation wants to find itself responding to a network breach resulting in data loss or theft. But as global cyber crime increases in both the frequency and sophistication of attacks on businesses, cyber recovery scenarios must now be treated as an inevitability.
When a breach first occurs, organisations must leap into action and make quick decisions with limited information on the extent of the breach. But a fast response is critical to mitigating risk and reducing the material damage and cost inflicted by this form of digital crime.
Investments into the right cybersecurity infrastructure and scenario-planning are essential. Many businesses assume their disaster recovery solutions are equipped to help them respond to any cyber attack that may occur. In reality, though, this technology is inadequate to support recovery from a cyber attack.
Relying on disaster recovery (DR) solutions to restore your business services could significantly increase the cost and consequence of a cyber breach. Today’s organisations need a different approach—one that gives them the resources and capabilities they need to quickly recover from a cyber attack and bring their business operations back online.
Recovery from a cyber attack can’t be achieved without trustworthy data
When a cyber attack strikes, access to trustworthy copies of critical data is essential. Recovery teams must have complete confidence in the validity and integrity of the data being used to restore workloads across your production environments.
When this trustworthy data is accessible in the aftermath of a cyber attack, it supports a better recovery in the following ways:
Recovery processes can be executed faster
When a cyber attack occurs, the validity of mission-critical data can be a significant roadblock to getting systems back online. The lack of a trusted record regarding data can force organisations to execute recovery actions based on data they don’t necessarily trust.
With access to trustworthy copies of data ,organisations don’t have to spend time vetting data or worrying over its integrity, all processes involving validated copies of data can be streamlined for a faster time-to-recovery.
Your full range of business services can be recovered
Tier 1 data will always take the highest priority when recovering from a cyber attack and restoring a minimum viable company. But by maintaining trustworthy copies of all of your business data—and storing them in a more secure location than a disaster recovery or backup environment—you can use these copies to eventually restore your non-critical workloads, bringing the full range of your business services back online.
Why disaster recovery isn’t equipped to meet the challenges of a cyber attack
Although disaster recovery backups and immutability can provide added degrees of security for mission-critical data, these protections can’t ensure that the data hasn’t been compromised in a cyber breach.
The most significant limitations of a DR approach to cyber recovery include:
- Potential exposure to cyber threats. Because disaster recovery environments are closely coupled with production environments, they represent a valid attack surface that bad actors may attempt to compromise. Data corruption that occurs within your production environment is a high risk for eventually breaching your DR environment.
- A lack of specialisation for cyber recovery events. DR solutions are designed to recover from disaster events. Cyber attacks are a different kind of event requiring a different approach to data isolation, testing, and recovery. Even if cyber threats didn’t compromise data stored in a backup environment, DR solutions aren’t designed to facilitate a fast, effective recovery from a cyber breach.
- DR environment access typically uses a common set of access credentials to production environments. CR solutions are isolated and have stringent and limited access controls.
If you can’t fully trust the integrity of your backup data, it’s useless to your recovery efforts. That’s why businesses need to implement infrastructure that delivers the complete isolation and protection required for effective cyber recovery.
Why a digital ‘vault’ is essential for true data security
Traditional approaches to data backup often store data in a mutable format, which leaves them exposed to ransomware attacks where criminals encrypt this data and demand a ransom payment in exchange for the release of your digital assets.
Immutable data addresses this liability, providing upgraded protection for your mission-critical data. But even immutable data is insufficient protection when it comes to recovering business workloads. To maximise protection, this data must be securely stored in an environment that is physically and logically separate from your digital infrastructure.
This isolation adds another layer of protection from cyber attacks that breach your network, and it creates a safe, controlled space where data can be tested and validated before copies are restored to your business network.
This isolated space is known as a ‘cyber vault,’ and it provides organisations with a secure, controlled, and effective infrastructure for recovering from cyber attacks on any scale. Triangle’s cyber recovery experts use a cyber vault—ensuring full data integrity for your recovery.
How Triangle cyber recovery supports comprehensive data protection and recovery
Data isolation in a secure vault brings new integrity and efficiencies to all aspects of your cyber recovery efforts. But a comprehensive cyber recovery position requires a number of tools and capabilities supporting everything from scenario-planning and testing to live recovery from a system breach.
Here are two critical cyber recovery services every organisation needs:
Continuous testing in a ‘clean room’
In addition to a cyber vault used to store copies of business data, a ‘clean room’ offers a secure space where continuous testing and validation of your data can be performed.
Regular testing is an essential step allowing organisations to successfully recover from that location when data becomes stolen, corrupted, or otherwise lost. Triangle’s design includes a physically and logically separate space that supports both testing and live recovery processes.
Improved recovery response
As you perform recovery processes and successfully restore specific workloads to your infrastructure, regular recovery testing can provide estimates on the amount of time required to perform these actions in the future—including in a live recovery setting.
This also supports compliance with the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), which requires that organisations be able to provide proof that they have successfully recovered workloads in the past and can recover in the future. Isolated environments and vaulted data combined with data forensics processes powered by machine learning make it easy to provide proof of compliance.
Take control of your recovery process
You can’t control whether your organisation is targeted by cyber criminals. And you can’t guarantee that your cybersecurity measures will thwart every attempted breach of your network.
But you can control the investments you’ve made into supporting a fast, efficient post-attack response. While disaster recovery solutions may not be up to the task of restoring your business workloads after a cyber attack, a comprehensive cyber recovery solution is specifically designed to get your business up and running again after a cyber breach.
Find out how Triangle’s Cyber Recovery solution can equip your business with the comprehensive solutions you need to recover, survive, and thrive after a cyber attack. Talk to one of our cyber security experts to learn more.
