You take all the recommended cybersecurity precautions. You back up. Your staff is trained on processes. You have firewalls in place, passwords that are hard to decipher, and the most recent security patches in place. Yet, you still worry. You’re not alone. According to a recent survey, businesses ranked cyberattacks as their #1 threat, with data breach a close second. But if you are victimized by a cybersecurity incident, what do you do now? If you have a business continuity plan in place, the answer to that question is easy: follow the business continuity plan.
A business continuity plan is not the same as a disaster recovery plan, although they have a lot of similarities. As CIO magazine explains, a BC plan is about “maintaining business functions or quickly resuming them in the event of a major disruption,” while DR “focuses mainly on restoring an IT infrastructure and operations after a crisis.” In other words, DR is specific to IT, while a business continuity plan is concerned with the continuity of the entire organization.
When you create your business continuity plan, make sure you consider these six criteria:
Conduct a business impact analysis
As Ready.gov reports, your business continuity plan should start with a complete analysis of the consequences of a business disruption and can include:
• Lost sales and income, or delayed sales or income
• Increased expenses (e.g., overtime labor, outsourcing, expediting costs, etc.)
• Regulatory fines
• Contractual penalties or loss of contractual bonuses
• Customer dissatisfaction or defection
• Delay of new business plans
Your Business Impact Analysis should also detail various risk scenarios and prioritize the order of events for restoration.
Get everyone involved
If you are assuming that IT security is solely the responsibility of the IT department, think again. Your entire organization should be working together to protect its data and systems. Consider holding a brief workshop on IT security, create a business continuity management committee with members within and outside the IT department, and consider the impact and recovery on each member of your staff.
One crucial area of involvement is with your leadership team. As reported by Disaster Recovery Journal, it’s important for executives to support a culture of collaboration and to be transparent. “If executives support a culture of transparency, people will be more willing to reveal and troubleshoot problem areas in your organization’s processes. Down the road, this could help the organization mitigate a major vulnerability.”
Establish workarounds
Ready.gov paints this scenario: “Telephones are ringing, and customer service staff is busy talking with customers and keying orders into the computer system. The electronic order entry system checks available inventory, processes payments and routes orders to the distribution center for fulfillment. Suddenly the order entry system goes down. What should the customer service staff do now?”
Developing manual workarounds eliminates uncertainty. For example, listing contact personnel (along with phone numbers and contact information) and providing specific details, such as how to document transactions manually, gives your team direction. You may need to reassign staff or even bring in temporary assistance if systems fail. How will you do that? Plan it all out now in your business continuity plan.
Keep data on the cloud
The best way to ensure your business can continue to run, is by backing up all your data on the cloud. A cloud service ensures that an organization’s critical data and processes are secure off-site. An organization can then quickly ramp up their systems in the case of a disaster.
Ready crisis communication efforts
How prepared is your organization to quickly and effectively respond to and communicate with the public—and each other–during or after a cybersecurity incident? If you are hit by a breach, you may need to issue statements to the press, customers, partners, vendors and staff. We recently posted an article about emergency communication preparedness, in which we stressed the importance of drafting some templates that cover various scenarios. As we wrote: “it’s faster and easier to tweak a message than to write one from scratch for a multitude of mediums, and even multiple languages, if needed.”
Test your business continuity plan
The time to ensure your business continuity plan is effective is before you need it. Is it comprehensive? Are there gaps? For example, are contact phone numbers correct? Are you able to restore data from the cloud without significant barriers or challenges? Since the network may be down, are there hard copies of the business continuity plan, and are they distributed to all the members of the team?
As suggested by CIO magazine, testing options for your business continuity plan include a table-top exercise in a conference room with the team looking for gaps, a structured walk-through or “fire-drill,” often with a specific disaster in mind, and disaster simulation testing in which an actual disaster is simulated involving all the equipment, supplies and personnel (including business partners and vendors) that would be needed.
Call DYOPATH
While all the steps above are important there’s a seventh step that may be just as vital: call an outside partner like DYOPATH. As experts in cloud services, IT security solutions and more, DYOPATH works with businesses, schools and other organizations to protect them from cyberattacks and help them recover when they’re hit. Planning, monitoring and adhering best practices go a long way to protecting your customers or clients, team members, vendors and your own business. Calling a partner like DYOPATH, and getting your business continuity plan published, are important first steps.