Faced with the imminent threat of a successful cyber breach, businesses must have a plan in place to quickly and safely recover their services and workloads with full data integrity.
By the time your business realises a cyber breach has occurred, time and uncertainty work against you, making it too late to fully test your backup and recovery people, processes, and technology. Standard disaster recovery solutions aren’t designed to handle the unique challenges of restoring operations after a cyber attack. To ensure your organisation’s continuity and survival, you must adopt targeted cyber recovery solutions tightly coupled with a comprehensive managed service—one that safeguards your data and the expertise required to resume operations swiftly and securely.
Effective managed service provides the expertise and resources to regularly test and optimise your recovery strategies before an attack occurs. And this same team will be ready to take action when a breach is detected, giving your business ultimate confidence in your ability to recover.
Solutions alone can’t fulfil your modern cyber recovery needs
Cyber recovery solutions deliver the isolated and secure infrastructure and tools your business needs to restore its data and operations after a cyber breach. From physically isolated vaults to intelligent forensics technologies, these solutions provide tools and capabilities that are integral to any recovery process.
But tools can’t operate themselves. While cyber recovery solutions provide an infrastructure for efficient, effective, and safe recovery processes, they need expert support from a specialist managed services provider to practise and guide these recoveries, be available when a breach happens —and to ensure that the overall recovery strategy remains optimised for your organisation’s needs.
If you have invested in cyber recovery solutions, you already have the technological infrastructure needed to maximise your business resilience and ability to recover from a major cyber attack. But your potential for a fast, effective recovery depends on whether those efforts are led by agile, expert-led recovery services.
Services vs. solutions: What’s the difference?
The complementary roles of cyber recovery solutions and services can make it difficult to separate one from the other. But the line of distinction between services and solutions is critical to understand, when making sure your organisation’s cyber recovery strategy is comprehensively designed.
Here are three key differences to keep in mind when comparing cyber recovery services and solutions:
- Solutions are technology-based. Services are expert-based. As mentioned already, cyber recovery solutions represent the tools and infrastructure your business needs to recover from a devastating attack. But the recovery itself requires support from experts who can manage a safe, controlled recovery under extreme pressure. Once the appropriate solutions are identified for your business, cyber recovery services deploy experts tasked with building, operating, and maintaining, not just technology, but processes and practices that are crucial to your recovery capability.
- Services help ensure your solutions are compliant and optimised for peak performance. Through continuous recovery testing, data integrity validation, compliance and operational checks, as well as monitoring and reporting, recovery services teams keep your organisation well-positioned to recover quickly and effectively when a breach occurs.
- Cyber recovery services are constantly evolving to fit the requirements of your technology. While cyber recovery solutions exist as isolated infrastructure, CR services are required to continually manage this technology. Meanwhile, every new technology added to your production environment requires new runbooks to be built, tested and regularly exercised by your Cyber Recovery services team.
4 elements of a strong cyber recovery service
Every cyber recovery service agreement should be tailored to the client organisation’s unique recovery challenges and needs. But a holistic approach to cyber recovery services should feature the following four core pillars:
1. Communication with forensics and recovery experts
Separation of duties across forensics and recovery teams is a must for a successful cyber recovery strategy. When a cyber breach occurs, data forensics teams are deployed to your organisation’s production environment to investigate the source and extent of the breach. In parallel, the recovery team is preparing to execute the recovery.
As forensics teams assess the breach’s scope and timeline, they can share this information with recovery teams to help define recovery parameters, including the point in time from which workloads should be recovered. On the flip side, recovery teams use data forensics tools to continuously monitor the integrity of data in the vault and can alert forensics teams to any anomalies, providing an early warning for further investigations.
2. Data recovery services
When data corruption or data loss occurs, data recovery services will help you recover and restore this data with full integrity.
Recovery experts can use ‘clean room’ technology to facilitate testing of mission-critical data and applications prior to recovery. Analytics of vaulted data can identify corrupt data files as soon as they are stored, so clean data can be pinpointed swiftly and to the last known healthy version. If needed, remediations or other actions can be performed in the clean room space prior to restoring those workloads to the production environment.
Data recovery should prioritise mission-critical data first to minimise business downtime and get vital operations up-and-running as quickly as possible.
3. Continuous recovery testing
Regular testing ensures that your organisation is ready to execute recovery processes whenever the need arises. Practice makes perfect. It’s important that the same team executing test recoveries is the same team recovering your business data in the event of a breach.
Continuous testing is essential to ensure operational and data validity. These tests also provide your organisation with an auditable proof of compliance if requested by regulators. Keep in mind that the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) requires organisations to maintain proof of prior success in recovering workloads.
4. Automation-assisted recovery processes
While expert response teams should be at the helm of any recovery process, automation should be deployed to maximise the agility and speed of cyber recovery and get business systems back online without delay.
Once recovery teams have ensured that workloads are ready to be recovered, automated workflows ensure the consistency of those recoveries each and every time.
How Triangle’s managed services enhance your cyber recovery capability
Cyber recovery doesn’t start when a breach is identified. It is a specialist practice dependent on a fully implemented recovery infrastructure that is continuously managed by a team of recovery experts. These experts know how to keep your recovery platform and recovery assets optimised, tested, secure and compliant.
Triangle’s specialist managed services team engage in the following activities:
Developing and exercising recovery runbooks
Each business service within your organisation’s production environment requires a recovery runbook. These runbooks provide step-by-step instructions for recovering your critical business data when a breach occurs. Once developed, these runbooks are exercised regularly by our team, which increases confidence in your ability to recover and optimises recovery processes for greater speed and efficiency.
Runbook reviews and enhancements are part of our continual service improvements, implemented through automation and process innovations, to strengthen the business’s recovery capabilities.
Lifecycle management
Lifecycle management of the vault and clean room has the same rules as any production environment but is executed securely and only by the authorised Triangle team to retain the principle of least privilege (PoLP) across the platform. The Triangle team is responsible for ensuring that code levels are in-line with production and are appropriate for the recovery needs.
Over time, these lifecycle management services should continually resize, reconfigure, and maintain this infrastructure in alignment with your evolving recovery needs.
Providing auditable proof of recovery
Triangle's managed service will provide auditable proof of successful workload recoveries as required by your specific regulatory needs, e.g. DORA and NIS2.
These auditable records not only prove that your business is capable of recovering a minimum viable company, but they document the amount of time required to successfully recover each of your runbooks.
Provide a breach recovery team
Not only will we prepare your business for a recovery and provide proof of that preparedness, we will deploy the same team—who know your environment, your business services runbooks and your core forensics and business teams—to execute the data recovery post breach.
When disaster strikes, you need experts guiding the way
Your organisation’s response to a successful cyber attack will go a long way toward determining the long-term cost and consequence of that breach. A slow, uncoordinated response won’t only increase the amount of time your business is taken offline. It could also affect the total material cost of the breach, as well as your company’s reputation.
Find out how Triangle’s Cyber Recovery services can help manage and restore your business data and preserve business continuity after a cyber breach.
