A crisis can hit as a network outage, a physical disaster, or a cyber-attack. During such times, your first instinct is to get back online. Fast. Your Business Continuity (BC) and Disaster Recovery (DR) plans are designed for exactly this moment. But what if the very plan designed to save you is creating your greatest vulnerability?
Too often, organizations treat continuity and security as separate disciplines. The rush to restore operations overrides essential security protocols, turning a manageable disruption into a devastating data breach.
Effective information security during a disruption isn’t an afterthought; it’s a prerequisite. Here is how to ensure your recovery process is resilient, not reckless.
Integrate Security from Day One
A successful data recovery strategy is a secure one. This begins long before any incident occurs and involves a systematic, cyclical approach to planning.
- Form a Cross-Functional Team: Your disaster recovery team can’t function in an IT silo. It must include key personnel from information security, risk management, and operations to make sure all perspectives are represented.
- Perform a Security-Focused Risk Assessment: Identify not only what can disrupt your business. Consider how those disruptions, as well as your response to them, expose sensitive data. Rank processes and operations based on both business impact and security risk.
- Develop Secure Recovery Strategies: Your strategies for failover, replication, and data restoration must have security controls built-in. This includes secure communication channels, access control for recovery sites, and data encryption both at rest and in transit.
Test Your Defenses, Not Just Your Uptime
An untested plan is a failed plan. Yet, the critical mistake many organizations make is conducting functional BC/DR tests that ignore security.
Make sure your testing exercises achieve two goals:
- Validate Operational Recovery: Can you restore services within your required time objectives?
- Validate Security Posture: Does the recovery process introduce new vulnerabilities? Is access to sensitive data properly restricted during failover? Are communication and escalation procedures secure and efficient?
This approach aligns with standards like ISO 22301, which mandates exercising and testing. Your information security team must be directly involved in designing these tests. They must also execute them to analyze from an attacker’s perspective.
The Bottom Line: Don’t Let Recovery Become Your Next Crisis
An organization is at its most vulnerable during a disruption. This is precisely when a secure, well-rehearsed plan is most critical. The assumption that you have a functional BC plan is not enough. You must be certain that your plan is also fundamentally secure.
Review your Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery plans today. Ask the hard question: Are we just planning to get back online, or are we planning to recover securely? The difference will decide whether you survive the disruption or become its next victim.
