As your business grows, the complexity of your infrastructure and the workflows required to maintain stable operations increase. Your disaster recovery (DR) playbook is an important element of keeping all of these elements viable over time, but only if it’s kept up to date.
Unfortunately, many businesses develop disaster recovery plans only to have them sit untested. Plans that were written two or three years ago often don’t represent the current state of the business and can leave significant gaps in recovery procedures.
To avoid this from happening, it’s important to follow specific strategies to evolve your DR playbook from a static document and instead make updating it a regular part of your business operations.
1. Shifting from a Static Document to a Living Framework
If your disaster recovery plan is just sitting on a shelf or tucked away on a mainframe and never reviewed, there’s a good chance that it won’t do much good for the business in a time of crisis. DR playbooks should be a living, breathing part of the business that grows and evolves time.
Getting it to this point means treating DR planning as a framework. Within this framework, there should be an iterative cycle of plan, test, review, and repeat. This ensures that as the business evolves, recovery planning evolves along with it.
These don’t have to be major business changes either. Even something as simple as hiring new staff, rearranging departmental responsibilities, or installing a new piece of software can have certain implications for your DR playbook that need to be considered.
2. Assessing the Evolving Risk Landscape
Growing a business comes with many different types of risks. One set of these risks is the expansion of a digital footprint that’s much more likely to be targeted by cybercriminals.
Regular risk assessments and business impact analyses (BIAs) should be standard practice to help minimize any potential vulnerabilities the business may be exposed to over time. These evaluations can be invaluable in the long run.
Risk assessments help the business to better understand the “current” status of its business, especially after a period of rapid growth. For example, while a business may have strict governance policies in place that adequately protect it when managing infrastructure in-house, transitioning to cloud environments can introduce an entirely new threat landscape.
3. Integrating Third-Party Risk Management into the DR Playbook
The majority of businesses today work with a wide network of vendors and outside partners to help drive their operations. These vendors can range from anything between payment processing services to cloud hosting platforms and shipping couriers. Each of these partnerships represents another area of risk that needs to be managed.
Third-party risk management should be a critical component of your DR playbook. When security breaches happen at any of your partners’ businesses, their regular access to your data can quickly change from convenience to liability.
It’s important to have specific SLAs in place with each of your third-party vendors when it comes to not only their day-to-day security efforts, but also their disaster recovery efforts.
4. Addressing Modern Technology Vulnerabilities
With the introduction of advanced AI-enabled technologies, expanding cloud services, and the ability to create highly interconnected business applications, securing each of these elements has become much more complex.
One of the challenges of maintaining these types of integrated services is the API “handshake” that needs to happen to make them work. These necessary elements are commonly targeted by cybercriminals to gain access to the data moving to and from separate services.
Your DR playbook should factor in these risks by outlining specific sections designated for an appropriate response to an API-based breach. In addition, working with API penetration testing services can also help to identify the integrity of your API connections across all your databases and connected services. These services help to stress-test these components while identifying potential gaps in your cloud security that need to be addressed.
5. Scaling Recovery Tiers and Strategies
One cyberattack is very different from the next, even if they’re classified as the same type of breach. It’s important that your DR playbook considers this and outlines specific recovery tiers based on the severity of each type of attack.
Create a framework that can quickly triage an incident that has taken place and trigger various stages of containment, eradication, and recovery based on the highest priorities for the business. These priorities should be stipulated based on the incident’s direct impact on revenue streams or core operations, with the most severe risks being addressed first.
This is another reason why your DR playbook should be updated regularly, as the business’s highest value elements may change considerably from one year to the next.
6. Enhancing Communication and Crisis Leadership
A common sign that a business has been growing is how the number of staff changes over time. Smaller departments grow to larger ones, those departments branch off and create other departments, and the list goes on. DR playbooks need to represent all of these changes accurately.
A critical element of creating a successful recovery plan is to have a clear crisis communication strategy in place. Individuals or teams involved in crisis leadership roles need to maintain an accurate record of their primary internal and external contacts, as well as a plan for maintaining communication if systems are offline.
As new hires join the organization or a certain amount of attrition has occurred, it’s critical to ensure the DR playbook accurately reflects these changes.
Ensure Your DR Playbook Grows With Your Business
To ensure your DR playbook is able to carry your business through a crisis successfully, it’s important to regularly maintain it over time. Instead of treating disaster recovery planning as a one-time process, make it a living, breathing document that scales just as quickly as your business. This will ensure it maintains its value when you need to rely on it the most.