In our modern, digitalised world, pretty much every organisation depends on its digital ecosystem. In the context of business continuity and legislation, failure to comply with regulations for data and privacy protection often results in high fines and a bad reputation, so it is important to properly protect your data against cyber threats.

Although prevention is better than curing, nothing and no one is unhackable. Compare it with the human world. As soon as you bump into people, you can come into contact with viruses. Living like a hermit without any human contact is the only way to reduce the risk of a viral infection to almost zero. The same applies to data: when you share data with others, there is always a risk of running into viruses and hacks.

Even with the best security measures in place, a hack cannot always be prevented. It is therefore important to be well-prepared by storing critical data safely and ensuring that as little data as possible is lost in the event of a cyber incident. This is possible with a good cyber recovery strategy. You can see such a strategy as a virtual moat around your company. In this article, we are going to show how you can develop an effective crisis plan for your data with the right cyber recovery steps and tools.

What is cyber recovery?

Cyber recovery refers to the process and measures organizations take to secure and recover an organisation's critical digital assets and information in the event of a cyberattack or data breach. The concept encompasses strategies and technologies aimed at recovering data, systems and operations after they have been compromised or lost due to a cyber incident.

The main components of cyber recovery are:

Backups and data recovery. This ensures that you can get systems operational again more quickly or allows you to restore them to a previous state. Making external backups in different (secure) storage environments ensures risk distribution.
Incident response planning. This is a script with steps and instructions that enables you to respond quickly and adequately to a cyber incident. Good incident response planning ensures damage limitation.
Redundancy and resilience. By using redundancy, you duplicate data so that it remains available in the event of a failure or disaster. This gives an organisation more resilience because processes can continue to operate or be shut down for a shorter period of time in the event of a cyber incident.

Why is cyber recovery important?

Cyber recovery is an important aspect of any good security strategy, for a number of reasons. We have listed the most important ones for you.

Increase in cyber threats

Cyber threats are increasing in both number and intensity. Cybercrime is an illegal revenue model that is gaining popularity and is rapidly professionalising and diversifying. In addition to the traditional culprits such as DDoS (denial-of-service) attacks, ransomware, malware and phishing, we also see that certain nation states are increasingly resorting to carrying out cyberattacks.

Modern hackers and cybercriminals work full-time and can often carry out multiple attacks at the same time. In addition, many hackers sell their proven software to colleagues, allowing newbies in the illegal business to carry out attacks faster and easier.

Protection against financial losses

Cyberattacks and data leaks cost money. Processes temporarily fail, causing production to stop or delay times to increase. The average cost of a cyber incident in Belgium is estimated at a little under 10,000 euros. Data leaks often result in sky-high fines. But why do you have to pay a fine while being robbed? As an owner, you are responsible for the data that you collect and process and must do everything reasonable to protect that data from criminals. If you fail to do so, you are actually publishing data that is private or sensitive and are therefore guilty of negligence.

Upholding your reputation

No organisation wants to be known as 'the company that does not properly manage its digital security'. A good strategy and the right tools for cyber recovery reduce the chance of data getting exposed. This way your good reputation remains intact.

Compliance with laws and regulations

The rules for data and privacy protection have been significantly tightened in recent years. This can be seen, among other things, in the GDPR obligation that every European organisation that processes personal data has. Taking cyber recovery seriously makes it easier to comply with data protection laws and regulations. Failure to comply with these requirements will result in reputational damage and fines. Fines for non-compliance with the GDPR can amount to a maximum of 20 million euros or 4 percent of annual turnover.

Restoration of operational continuity

A good cyber recovery system improves operational continuity. You can restart processes and systems faster, while data becomes available again within a shorter time window. Moreover, a quick recovery of operational continuity saves you money. If you are offline, you have less or no income. Being back online in the blink of an eye means a smaller loss of income.
Protection of intellectual property
Your own creations, ideas and working methods are a great asset and an important foundation for business success. By keeping business-critical data safely under lock and key, you also protect your intellectual property in the event of a cyber incident.

The steps towards an effective crisis plan

An effective crisis plan forms the basis for a successful cyber recovery. But what steps do you need to take when designing and implementing such a crisis plan? Let's find out.

1. Risk analysis and vulnerability assessment

Carefully check all parts of your IT landscape for potential vulnerabilities. Identify the weak spots within your IT ecosystem and determine which areas require extra attention.

2. Define your goals and the desired security level

Define your goals, the desired level of security, and the degree of cyber recovery you are aiming for. Consider defining acceptable figures for downtime and data loss (RTO and RPO) in the event of a cyber incident. recovery time objective (RTO) is the maximum time in which a system must be available again after a failure, while recovery point objective (RPO) refers to the maximum amount of data loss that is acceptable in the event of a failure or incident. You should also assess which data is most sensitive and extra business or mission-critical.

3. Response and recovery

Create a response and recovery team that possesses sufficient knowledge of cybersecurity, business processes, and backup and recovery options. These can also be external specialists.

4. Backup strategies and frequency

Determine where you store backups and how often you make backups of certain data and systems. A popular model is the 3-2-1 strategy. This means that there are three copies of your data in different places, two copies on different storage media and one copy in a place other than your own business location. Also, always make sure that your backup is recent enough so that you don't miss a lot of work and data if an incident occurs.

5. Define recovery procedures

Develop clear procedures for recovering data and systems in the event of a cyber incident. Clearly record all steps, measures and working methods and ensure that all employees within the organisation know exactly how to act when a problem occurs.

6. Implement

Implement the preventive measures. Involve the entire organisation in the process so that everyone knows what the intention is if you encounter a cyber incident. Also plan the implementation phase accurately in time and space. This allows you to keep the disturbance of regular business processes that continue as normal limited to a bare minimum.

7. Make a clear communication plan

Draw up a clear communication plan. This way, everyone knows when and how to report (indications that indicate) cyber incidents and implement the correct response and recovery procedures.

8. Invest in training and adoption

A crisis plan only works if it's properly adopted by the organisation. This certainly applies to cybersecurity, where humans are often the weakest link in the security chain. Therefore, offer employees clear instructions and good training programmes in the field of cybersecurity and cyber recovery.

9. Collaborate with external experts

Collaborate with external experts who specialize in various aspects of cybersecurity, cyber recovery and hardware optimization. With a good network of external specialists, you can build a compendium of knowledge that cannot be achieved internally. Moreover, your employees can focus on the things they know like the back of their hand: the internal processes.

10. Document and evaluate

Document everything. Good documentation allows you to build a collection of knowledge and best practices that will be extremely useful now and in the future. In addition, continuously evaluate your cyber recovery strategies and adjust them as necessary. Testing and performing simulations play an important role in doing this.

Cyber recovery in action: the Cyber Recovery Vault

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Cyber recovery differs from 'regular' disaster recovery. The main difference is that with cyber recovery, you rebuild hacked systems from scratch. An example of cyber recovery at its best, which also pays sufficient attention to the physical aspect of data protection, is the Cyber Recovery Vault from Digital Realty.

How does it work? The process starts with identifying business and mission-critical data. What data do I need to recover and in what order? From a shared data centre, the data enters a staging area or clean room (a special environment for data recovery). From there, the data passes through an air gap, a secure intermediate environment that separates a device or network from other devices and networks, to the digital vault.

The so-called 'war room' plays an important role during the process. This is a clean workspace from where the recovery team specialists do their thing and view all data from the vault. From the vault, the experts in the war room rebuild the organisation by testing and recovering data and reinstalling it from other (clean) data centres in your own data centre environment.

The 'war room' plays an important role in the process.

How Digital Realty helps

Building a sturdy digital safe and setting up a war room requires specific knowledge and hardware. It is not easy to achieve this in-house, especially for organisations that are not dedicated tech companies. The good news is that the right external specialists can help you.

"With us, you can rely on a powerful and extensive partner ecosystem. We arrange the IT and infrastructure for the digital vault and the recovery process, so that you only have to focus on the data," says Erwin uit de Bos, solution architect at Digital Realty.

"With us, you can rely on a powerful and extensive partner ecosystem.

Would you like to know more? In this day and age, cyber recovery is an indispensable part of your digital defence line. Digital Realty is happy to help you set up this part of your security policy. Do you want to know more about our Cyber Recovery Vault and other services? Please feel free to call +32 2 709 03 60 or send an email to salesbe@digitalreality.com.

Cyber recovery: a crisis plan for your data