Beyond Disaster Recovery

Today, more than ever, Australian businesses face increasingly sophisticated cyber threats that can disrupt operations and compromise sensitive data. While traditional disaster recovery plans focus on restoring systems after unexpected failures, the concept of "Beyond Disaster Recovery" is crucial. This approach emphasises proactive strategies to not only recover from but also prevent and mitigate the impact of cyberattacks, ensuring business continuity and protecting critical assets in a more comprehensive and resilient manner.

Cyber recovery specifically addresses malicious attacks like ransomware or data breaches, where attackers deliberately target your systems and corrupt your data. These attacks can compromise anything from a subset of data to your entire infrastructure, including disaster recovery failover sites.

Unlike traditional recovery processes, cyber recovery often involves a thorough investigation and remediation phase before actual recovery can begin, which can significantly extend the timeline. It’s essential to contain the attack and ensure that no vulnerabilities remain. Every aspect of your environment—hardware, data, and backups—must be meticulously examined for signs of infection, as attackers may have embedded malware or tampered with backup files.

The primary goals are to minimise damage, prevent data loss, and restore your security posture.

DISASTER RECOVERY TESTING IS NOT ENOUGH

CYBER RECOVERY TESTING IS CRITICAL

Cyber recovery testing is essentially a practice run—an operational test—of restoring an application and its data from a backup, simulating the exact process that would occur during a cyber incident. This type of testing is more comprehensive than traditional disaster recovery testing. While both disaster recovery and cyber recovery testing have their respective roles, cyber recovery is particularly vital due to its focus on combating sophisticated cyber threats.

Cyber recovery testing not only strengthens your systems and data resilience but also ensures business continuity. The complexity of recovering critical applications and data can present numerous challenges. By conducting cyber recovery tests, you can identify and resolve potential issues in a controlled environment before they become critical during an actual cyber event.

Testing provides your teams with the practice and confidence needed to effectively recover critical applications and data in the event of a cyber incident. We emphasise the importance of regular backups that are protected, maintained, and tested, stating that "it is better to identify an unexpected issue during testing than during an actual cyber event." However, the reality is that few organisations conduct these tests fully, frequently, and successfully.