Perhaps the worst IT scenario an organization can face is an unexpected and forced suspension of all its operations. The downtime that’s experienced in such a situation can lead to financial damages that far exceed those from lost data or hits to reputation. While cyberattacks vary in intensity and approach, downtime and catastrophic loss of data come in many more forms and are equally, if not more, difficult to avoid.
Disaster recovery (DR) plans are not one-size-fits-all. There’s no silver bullet, and without a clear understanding and some level of customization, a DR plan done wrong will have detrimental effects on an organization’s operations and business. And let’s not forget the wrecking ball a bad DR plan delivers to the VAR or MSP who designed and executed it. Loss of business aside, there’s guilt, reputation damage, and potential lawsuits. It’s not a good day.
Around six years ago on a Wednesday morning, software professionals worldwide were startled by a tweet from GitLab stating that they had accidentally deleted their production data, causing their site to go offline. Unfortunately, at that point in time, the open-source code repository giant had no idea that it would take them another 36 hours to restore their systems only to learn that 5,000 projects and 700 new user accounts were affected while they were fixing the outage.
With more than $80 billion of loan collateral in its systems, DataScan is an industry leader in providing solutions for wholesale asset financing and inventory risk management. The company’s InfoSec leadership understood that they needed to take a whole new approach to incident response and to advance its security maturity. Having multiple tools for managing incidents and conducting business was translating into inefficiencies, prolonged resolutions, and stress.
If there is one thing organizations can take away from the past few years, it's that they are far more vulnerable than they could realize before. From pandemics to critical supply shortages to widespread data breaches and natural disasters, businesses that don’t have plans in place to handle and respond to emergencies are at tremendous risk. As leaders plan for inevitable crises and disruption, interest in business resilience and continuity grows.
