Cyber Resilience Planning: Building Business Continuity into Your IT Infrastructure
Cyberattacks, system failures, natural disasters, and human errors will occur—the question isn't if but when. Cyber resilience planning ensures organisations can withstand incidents, maintain critical operations during disruptions, and recover quickly when systems fail. It's not just about preventing attacks; it's about ensuring business continuity regardless of what goes wrong.
Beyond Traditional Disaster Recovery
Traditional disaster recovery focused primarily on data backup and system restoration. Cyber resilience encompasses broader concerns including maintaining operations during incidents, rapidly detecting and responding to threats, containing damage before it spreads, recovering systems and data effectively, and learning from incidents to strengthen defences.
The distinction matters because modern threats specifically target backup systems and disaster recovery capabilities. Ransomware attackers encrypt backups alongside production data. Supply chain attacks compromise recovery tools themselves. Resilience requires assuming attackers will attempt to disable recovery capabilities.
Essential Resilience Components
Comprehensive Backup Strategy – The 3-2-1 rule remains fundamental: three copies of data, on two different media types, with one copy off-site. Modern implementations add immutable backups that cannot be modified or deleted, even by administrators. Regular testing verifies backups actually work—discovering backup failures during recovery attempts is too late.
Incident Response Planning – Documented procedures ensure rapid, coordinated response when incidents occur. Who needs to be notified? What immediate actions contain damage? How do you communicate with customers, regulators, and staff? Pre-established relationships with forensics specialists, legal counsel, and cybersecurity experts enable faster response than scrambling to find help during crises.
Business Impact Analysis – Understanding which systems are truly critical informs resilience investments. Not everything requires the same level of protection. Identify recovery time objectives (how quickly systems must be restored) and recovery point objectives (how much data loss is acceptable) for each critical system.
Redundancy and Failover – Critical systems need redundant components enabling automatic failover when primary systems fail. This might include redundant network connections, clustered servers, or entire duplicate data centres. Cloud platforms simplify geographic redundancy through multi-region deployments.
Security Monitoring – Detecting threats quickly minimises damage. Security information and event management (SIEM) platforms aggregate logs, identify suspicious patterns, and trigger alerts when threats are detected. 24/7 monitoring ensures threats are addressed promptly rather than festering for days.
Testing and Validation
Resilience plans look impressive on paper but fail in practice if never tested. Regular testing validates backup restoration, exercises incident response procedures, identifies gaps in documentation, trains staff on their responsibilities, and measures actual recovery times against objectives.
Tabletop exercises bring together key stakeholders to work through incident scenarios. Technical drills test actual system recovery. Surprise tests reveal whether procedures work when staff aren't explicitly prepared.
Building Comprehensive Resilience
Altiatech offers comprehensive business continuity services from concept to completion, providing secure, reliable backup and recovery solutions for physical and virtual environments alongside 24/7 monitoring and incident response capabilities.
Is your organisation truly resilient?
Contact us to assess your cyber resilience and build business continuity into your IT infrastructure.
📞 +44 (0)330 332 5482 | 📧 innovate@altiatech.com
