Business continuity planning can get sticky as enterprises transition to the cloud. For many organizations, this represents the first time they’ve shared security responsibilities with a third party, and it may be challenging to get comfortable with this arrangement. In order to take advantage of cloud benefits, an enterprise must be willing to give over a little control.
What’s important to note is that no cloud provider can save an enterprise from itself. No matter how much responsibility a third-party provider takes on, they simply can’t be responsible for administration errors, lost devices, or bad login practices. Ultimately, the data belongs to the enterprise, so your enterprise needs to be sure disaster recovery, cybersecurity, and other business continuity plans are in place.
How to Tell if a Business Continuity Plan Is on Track
There are two important metrics that every business should examine to determine if they’re addressing business continuity with enough resources and planning:
- Recovery Point Objective (RPO): This is the maximum acceptable time between the data loss and the last good backup.
- Recovery Time Objective (RTO): This is the maximum acceptable time for a business to be up and running after a disaster. This is the time it takes, from start to finish, to recover the necessary data and systems for normal business processes.
Along with measuring these two areas to determine a company’s business continuity preparedness, it’s also important to classify applications and data according to how critical they are to keeping things running:
- Existentially critical applications and data are those that will immediately cause the organization to stop running if they are not available.
- Mission-critical data and systems are central to employee productivity and business processes, but there are ways to work around them if absolutely necessary.
- Optimal–for-performance systems, if not available, will cause a reduction in productivity and service may not be as seamless, but the business can function at acceptable levels without them.
It’s important for organizations to prepare business continuity plans with attention given to RPO and RTO because of the increasing variety of ransomware being launched at every size business. Companies should have a specific ransomware response plan ready and tested. While ransomware attacks can’t be prevented, it’s important to be sure that backups and recovery plans are in place.
Is your enterprise prepared for the possibility of a ransomware attack? If you’re not sure, contact us at Copper State Communications. We can help you assess your business continuity plan and determine what plan of action is necessary to protect your assets for the future.
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