IT Resilience Planning: Ensuring Business Continuity in the Face

There are than 800.000 cybercrime-related complaints filed in 2022, as the FBI report claims. Losses go way over $10 billion as stated by the bureau’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3). One of the biggest security breaches and financial loses in the recent years compromised social security numbers, banking information and personal information of customers.

IT resilience planning is the process of preparing an organization’s IT to withstand and quickly recover from disruptions like cyberattacks, natural disasters, and hardware issues. With it, IT systems and data remain untouched and protected. IT resilience planning is essential for business continuity as it provides needed streamline of uninterrupted and proactive work maintaining business operations.

These are some of the benefits of a strong IT resilience plan:

• Reduced downtime and financial loss

• Improved customer confidence

• Maintaining critical functions and services

• Building stable reputation

The Threat Landscape

In face of variety of disruptions, the future of businesses is as stressful as ever. These discrepancies can significantly impact their IT infrastructure and operations. Some of the major types of disruptions are:

• Ransomware, phishing, DDoS, and other attacks affect IT infrastructure and systems by destroying data, and stealing sensitive and private information. In turn, the fallacies lead to data breaches, financial failures and losses, loss of customer trust, time consumption for setting new systems and operations up, etc.

• Physical damage is significant as much as the digital one. Earthquakes, floods, fires and hurricanes could damage hardware and destroy communication and power lines. This stops any business activities and requires repair and maintenance.

• Power outages disrupt all IT operations affecting productivity, transactions and enabling breaches.

• Employees are responsible for operational disruptions that are cost ineffective, and require long recovery times, data restoration and system reconfiguration.

Building Your IT Resilience Plan

What is a BIA?

A Business Impact Analysis (BIA) is a process that identifies and evaluates effects of disruptions on critical business operations. The goal of BIA is to identify and highlight detrimental business functions and their dependencies on IT systems, and to determine how these potential disruptions impact the organization as a whole.

Some Example Questions to Guide the BIA Process:

1. What are the most critical business functions in your organization?

2. Which IT systems support these functions?

3. What is the result of a disruption of the system for 5 hours?

4. How severe is the financial and operational impact in case of an IT system outage?

5. What is your backup/recovery measures?

RTO is the maximum acceptable amount of time that a business process can be down after a disruption before suffering catastrophic consequences. RTO gives an estimate as to how effectively the IT system is to be restored.

RPO is the maximum acceptable amount of data loss measured in time. RPO defines the point in time when data must be retrieved and recovered to resume business operations after a disruption.

• Disaster recovery. Disaster recovery is an ability to recover from an unforeseen disruption that impacts normal business operations. DR (Disaster recovery) planning helps businesses protect critical data and restore normal operations in a timely manner.

• Failover/failback. Failover is a procedure where businesses move valuable data to a secondary system when a primary one fails. Failback is an operation where processes are switched back to the original system when the threat has been averted or removed.

• Virtualized recovery plans. An on-demand software as a service (SaaS) that relies on virtual machine instances that are ready to operate immediately upon a disruption of an original system. They provide recovery by taking on workloads without failure.

• Redundancy. Applying redundant systems to provide failover if it comes to hardware or software disruption.

Before you can test the recovery plan conducted from the previous bullet points, you need to implement and document the protocols. This should be done concisely and thoroughly, where all scenarios and outcomes are meticulously detected. It is highly recommended to include a checklist for critical tasks as well.

Task delegation should be one of your top priorities. If you want a synergized team and open cooperation, you should define specific roles and responsibilities to all team members involved in IT resilience plan. Clear chain of command is half the work.

Employees must be familiarized with all aspects of the IT resilience plan in order to conduct it successfully. The training should contain backup systems, emergency procedures and communication protocols.

In order to make something second nature, you need to practice it regularly. Testing of the IT resilience plan will make it more effective and productive. This can be done with simulated disruptions, frequent updates and reviews as well as performance assessments.

• Cloud-based disaster recovery. Cloud-based disaster recovery is a method of backing up and restoring business’ critical data and applications through cloud resources. More frequently than not, businesses opt for keeping copies of their critical data on the cloud which is more secure and ensures quick recovery in case of disruption or disaster.

• Importance of risk assessment and updates. Ongoing risk assessment helps in identifying new threats, estimating current controls, resource prioritization and adapting to changes.

IT resilience planning prepares IT infrastructure for recovery and reparation in case of disruptions like cyberattacks, natural disasters, power outages and human errors. It is necessary to conduct BIA (Business Impact Analysis) to identify critical functions and apply recovery strategies like failover, failback, redundancy, disaster recovery and virtualized recovery plans. Solidifying roles and responsibilities, including employee training, regular testing and documenting procedures are strategies that will help with IT resilience planning, that, in turn, minimizes downtime and protects critical data.

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IT gets better with continuity.