Step 4: Recover

Too often, backup and recovery are treated as “in case we need it” activities. Businesses dutifully run backups, but give little consideration to whether the systems being backed up can be fully recovered. Result? Backups that can’t restore the systems impacted back to their full functionality.

Remember: The goal of a cyber resilience strategy is to keep the business running through an attack and recovering to a semblance of normal operations as quickly as possible. Therefore, anticipating how you will effectively recover from a cyber incident is an integral part of your initial planning.

Of course, having a good backup that you can recover from is absolutely critical if a ransomware attack manages to encrypt your systems and data. But consider this as well: When there’s an intrusion on your network, an attempt to intrude, or the suspicion of one, reaction time is critical.

Once an intruder has compromised one or more devices on your network, the next step is to move laterally through the system, use compromised accounts to gain access to other systems, escalate privileges and gain administrative access.

Responding to an active, in-progress intrusion may involve shutting down production systems or isolating them to limit any further damage to the business. If you suspect that a key system has been badly compromised, your best strategy could well be to restore from a backup.

Anticipate these possible scenarios as part of your business continuity planning, and it will pay huge dividends when you’re faced with an attack. You’ll have to spend fewer hours analyzing the situation and formulating the best response, at a time when minutes and seconds count.

ESET Solutions

ESET’s partner Xopero provides total protection, backup and recovery of your business data onsite or in the cloud. Utilizing advanced cloud backup for computers, servers and virtual environments, it allows you to easily create backups, and synchronize and restore data from servers and workstations.