Imagine for a moment that a ransomware group successfully attacks your business. Your sensitive company data is stolen, and on your screen is a ransom demand for hundreds of thousands of dollars and a threat to recur the attack if you don’t pay.
How prepared is your company to handle this moment? Or, put another way, how well can your business recover from your data being stolen, return to normal operations quickly, and implement new solutions to protect your data in the future?
The answers to these questions illustrate your business’ data resilience. And when 43% of cyberattacks are aimed at small businesses, having an effective data resilience strategy in place at your business can mean the difference between returning to operations or closing your doors.
Understanding Data Resilience
Data resilience is a business’s ability to mitigate cyberattacks, keep data available to users, ensure data integrity, and recover from unexpected data-related incidents. An effective data resilience strategy accounts for disruptions to business continuity and prioritizes data recovery and improving the environment’s cybersecurity posture.
While cyberattacks are the most prevalent threats to data resilience, a business must also have a data resilience strategy that helps recover from incidents, such as:
- Software errors
- Hardware malfunctions
- Cloud resource errors
- Power outages
- Natural disasters
- Human error
Your data resilience strategy should establish best practices for emergency situations and coordinate backup/recovery tools with cybersecurity solutions to get the business up and running again with a stronger, more resilient cybersecurity posture.
5 Key Strategies for Building Sustainable Data Resilience
Here are five essential elements to include in an SMB’s data resilience strategy.
Strategy 1: Build a Data Resilience Strategy Framework
A data resilience strategy framework is a plan for how your business will ensure data availability and integrity. It includes developing backup procedures and recovery planning for when unexpected events occur. It is recommended to include cybersecurity solutions in your strategy framework along with audits or assessments to measure successful adherence.
An example data resilience strategy framework would include:
- Data backup services and testing at regular intervals.
- Cybersecurity solutions include data masking, endpoint protection, and network monitoring.
- Robust disaster recovery policies for common threats facing the business.
- Network segmentation and privilege/access controls.
- Employee training in cybersecurity and data handling.
- Clearly established goals for data recovery and timeframes for how quickly to have the network up and running again.
- Third-party audits and consultations that improve environment security posture and policies.
The only data resilience strategy that works is one in which everyone in the business knows their role. Everyone involved in the strategy must know what to do in an emergency and have the tools to execute their responsibilities quickly. When trained well and equipped with the correct tools, everyone can meet set objectives for recovery time and business continuity.
Strategy 2: Implement a Comprehensive Data Backup Plan
Consistent and reliable data backups are the backbone of a strong data resilience strategy. Having regularly scheduled backups for your important data allows your business to respond quickly to accidental file deletions, hardware failures, and cyberattacks.
Don’t just use any backup solution, though. Take time to strategize the best data backup solutions for your business. For example, a business working with sensitive production data may need live backup services to ensure every file is backed up as it’s being created.
Alternatively, a business may need offsite backups if it doesn’t have much office space or its area is prone to natural disasters. Cloud backup solutions also allow for quick infrastructure scaling and redundancy, which can help mitigate many forms of cyberattacks that attempt to encrypt data.
Other important factors to consider when implementing backup solutions include:
- Frequency
- Ease of automating backups
- The need for testing data backups
- Access privileges to backed-up data
Strategy 3: Embrace Data Observability for Early Detection
Speed is everything when it comes to effectively maintaining reliable and secure data. To enact your data resilience strategy framework, you need the data observability necessary to know the moment something goes wrong.
Data observability allows you to have real-time information on the health and performance of your data systems. The tools used to monitor and address data issues should have capabilities such as:
- Automated monitoring and threat detection
- Robust alerts and insights
- Root cause analysis
- Logging
- Data tracking from origin to destinations within the network
By improving observability, businesses increase their security by reducing response times to threats and data abnormalities. Gartner expects that 70% of organizations with properly implemented observability for their data will have shorter decision-making latency.
Strategy 4: Leverage Data Resiliency in Cloud Computing
For many small and medium businesses, cloud computing can greatly improve data resiliency with cloud-native tools and features.
For example, many cloud services offer multiple levels of redundancy so that your data can be backed up in different locations – even across several regions. This makes ransomware attacks easier to defend against and disaster recovery simpler with access to multiple redundant backups.
Small and medium businesses can also leverage how scalable data storage can be in the cloud for cost savings and faster deployment times. This cloud-based infrastructure is also less prone to downtime and helps your team get work done when on-premises technology malfunctions.
At a minimum, it is recommended to make use of some cloud-based resources for both data backup and disaster recovery purposes. IT consultants can often help with finding the right cloud services for your business, but it is important that the services you choose have regular testing for backups and options for having some or all of your data sent to you on physical drives.
Strategy 5: Prioritize Data Governance and Compliance
Perhaps the best strategy for creating sustainable data resilience is to be proactive with data governance.
Often, different departments or teams within a business can process or integrate data differently, leading to data inconsistencies, integrity problems, and analytics inaccuracy. Data governance aims to create centralized coordination for how a business’ data is created, stored, managed, and used.
An SMB can implement data governance by creating policies and procedures for data access and analysis and then assigning data stewards who are responsible for data management. Additionally, anyone in the business who handles data directly should know their responsibilities for storing and managing that data safely and adhere to centralized policies.
While small businesses may not always need to implement full-scale data governance immediately, any business that plans for growth or needs to adhere to compliance standards (such as CCPA or GDRP) is recommended to implement data governance early. IT consulting services can be a strong resource for businesses beginning their data governance journey.
Creating a Sustainable Data Resilience Strategy
Imagine again that scenario where malicious actors have successfully launched a ransomware attack against your business. If you created a data resilience strategy framework, then every staff member would know exactly how to react to restore backups and follow the plans and policies you created with your IT consultant.
Or, your data observability and network monitoring solutions could have caught the attack early and remediated the threat automatically. You’d feel more secure with cloud-based backups, and the business’s data stewards would know exactly how to verify the security and integrity of the company’s information.
This means your business has a better chance of turning that unexpected event into a learning moment rather than a disaster, and you’ll be better prepared for future threats.
Do you need help beginning your data resilience strategy? The Robinett Consulting team has decades of experience assisting SMBs with creating plans and policies for data resilience and cybersecurity.
Reach out to one of our engineers for a complimentary consultation today to see how we can help you on your data resilience journey!
