Cyber recovery

What is cyber recovery?

Cyber recovery involves several challenges that organizations must address to effectively restore systems and data after a cyber attack. 

Key cyber recovery challenges

• Sophistication of cyber attacks: Cyber threats are becoming increasingly sophisticated and targeted. Attackers often use advanced techniques to evade detection and cause maximum disruption, making it difficult to recover quickly.
• Detection and identification: Identifying the presence of a cyber attack and understanding its full scope can be challenging. Some attacks may go undetected for long periods, complicating the recovery process.
• Data integrity: Ensuring the integrity of data during recovery is crucial. Cyber attacks, such as ransomware, can corrupt or encrypt data, making it difficult to determine which data is trustworthy and clean.
• Complex IT environments: Modern IT environments are often complex and heterogeneous, with a mix of on-premises, cloud, and hybrid systems. Coordinating recovery across these different environments can be challenging.
• Resource constraints: Cyber recovery requires specialized skills and resources that may not always be readily available. Organizations may face challenges in allocating the necessary personnel, tools, and budget for effective recovery.
• Regulatory compliance: Organizations must comply with various regulatory requirements related to data protection and breach notification. Ensuring compliance while managing recovery can be a complex task.
• Communication and coordination: Effective communication and coordination are vital during a cyber recovery process. Ensuring that all stakeholders are informed and working together can be challenging, especially in large organizations.
• Backup and recovery strategy: Having an effective and reliable backup and recovery strategy is essential. Organizations must ensure that their backup data is up-to-date, secure, and can be restored quickly. Additionally, backups should be protected from being compromised during an attack.
• Incident response planning: Developing and maintaining a comprehensive incident response plan that includes cyber recovery is critical. The plan must be regularly tested and updated to address evolving threats and changes in the IT environment.
• Downtime and business continuity: Minimizing downtime and ensuring business continuity during recovery is a significant challenge. Organizations must balance the need for quick recovery with the need to ensure that systems are secure and free from threats.
• Forensic analysis: Conducting a thorough forensic analysis to understand the attack, identify the root cause, and ensure that all threats have been eradicated is essential. This process can be time-consuming and requires specialized expertise.
• Reputation management: Managing the organization's reputation during and after a cyber incident is crucial. Effective communication with customers, partners, and stakeholders is essential to maintain trust and confidence.

Strategies to overcome challenges

• Invest in advanced security technologies: Implementing advanced threat detection and response solutions can help identify and mitigate attacks more effectively.
• Regular testing and drills: Conducting regular tests and recovery drills to ensure that the cyber recovery plan is effective and that all stakeholders are familiar with their roles.
• Employee training and awareness: Providing regular training to employees on cyber threats and best practices to reduce the risk of human error.
• Collaboration with experts: Engaging with cybersecurity experts and third-party providers to enhance recovery capabilities.
• Continuous improvement: Continuously reviewing and improving the cyber recovery plan based on lessons learned from incidents and changes in the threat landscape.

By addressing these challenges proactively, organizations can improve their resilience and ability to recover from cyber incidents effectively.

Similarities

• Both restore IT services and data for business continuity.
• They need frequent testing and upgrades to work.
• Both reduce disruption-related downtime and operational effect.

How they work together

Businesses should combine cyber and disaster recovery into a single business continuity plan to manage varied threats. It means:

• Coordination of cyber and non-cyber recovery plans.
• Installing cyber-resistant backup systems.
• Test response plans together to find gaps.
• Ensure IT security and business continuity teams collaborate.

Combining these methods helps firms protect operations, limit costs, and recover rapidly from disruptions like cyber attacks and natural disasters.

Zerto, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, helps organizations achieve an always-on business, protecting them from cyberattacks with exceptional RPOs and RTOs at enterprise scale. Zerto is hardware and storage agnostic allowing it to bridge on-premises and cloud environments, enabling disaster recovery to, from, and within the cloud. Zerto uses patented continuous data protection that combines near-synchronous replication, unique journaling, and application-centric protection groups to reduce data loss to seconds and recovery to minutes. With automation, orchestration, analytics, non-disruptive testing, and more, Zerto protects and recovers your critical data and applications from any attack. Here are some of the key benefits:

Detect and attack within seconds: To give you the earliest warning that an attack has begun, Zerto analyses changed blocks in real-time and detects encryption anomalies within seconds. This allowing you to identify an attack and initiate a response more quickly than typical post-processing scans.

Protect recovery data from attackers: To prevent attackers from preventing recovery, Zerto can create immutable recovery data copies from recovery points in the journal, making them invulnerable to modification or deletion by attackers.

Recovery in isolation: To protect your recovered data from further attacks, Zerto creates air-gapped recovery networks that allow you to recover data outside the reach of outside attackers.

Test non-disruptively for compliance: To validate your cyber resilience strategy for compliance, Zerto non-disruptive testing allows you to test cyber recovery plans in isolation without disrupting production or interrupting protection.

Minimize data loss and downtime: To minimize the impact of a ransomware attack, Zerto continuous data protection provides exceptional RPO and RTO to allow you to recovery data granularly with only seconds of data loss and recovery times measured in minutes.

Zerto Cyber Resilience Vault: Built with HPE Alletra Storage, HPE ProLiant Compute, and HPE Aruba Networking, this vault offers the highest level of data protection from cyber attackers with physical isolation and recovery addressing worst case cyberattack scenarios.