Aligning a business continuity plan with digital transformation initiatives can feel like mission impossible—but it doesn’t have to be. With the right approach, businesses can ensure rapid recovery from disruptions and maintain data integrity.
Ensure your organization’s cyber safety—and your IT staff’s sanity—by following these basic principles of disaster recovery preparation and planning:
- Preparation: Don’t hide your head in the sand when it comes to business continuity. Cyberattacks are inevitable, so it’s better to be ready than face a scenario where your staff are panicking after an attack. With a cloud-smart disaster recovery plan (DRP) in place, you’ll know exactly how to detect and react to a cyberattack or data breach and mitigate the damage.
- Recovery: Losing data can happen for all sorts of reasons—ransomware, hacktivism, natural disaster, or human error. Use the 3-2-1-1-0 rule: three copies of your data on two separate media, one offsite and one immutable, and with verified, zero-error backups.
- Leverage Technology: Deploy the best digital tools you can afford. Ask yourself: How much will one hour of downtime cost? A day? A week? If you can’t afford the downtime, the cost of digital tools to detect cyber anomalies is a cloud-smart move.
Every organization has its own unique set of requirements, goals, and challenges, so making a comprehensive examination of your business objectives and how your digital infrastructure can support and protect your growth is a must.
Business continuity in an uncertain world: A multi-tiered approach
A multi-layered data protection strategy provides comprehensive cloud security across all levels of your IT infrastructure, addressing critical pain points such as compatibility, scalability, compliance, and rapid recovery.
Tier 1 is your first line of defence against cyberattacks and data loss. It includes data backup tools and strategies to protect and restore data quickly.
Tier 2 provides more advanced capabilities to address the importance of minimizing downtime and ensuring efficient disaster recovery.
Tier 3 offers the highest level of protection to ensure seamless continuity and restored security, ensuring regulatory compliance and managing complex disaster recovery plans across multiple platforms.
What you need to know to choose the best business continuity plan for your organization:
- What are your biggest challenges in aligning data protection with digital transformation?
- How do industry regulations impact multi-layered security strategies, especially for larger enterprises?
A comprehensive, cloud-smart disaster recovery plan will help you lay out these priorities for your organization and identify strategies and tools that support your goals and objectives.
1-2-3: The multi-layered approach to business continuity
A three-tiered approach to business continuity layers your protection so you can build a foundation and scale up as your security needs grow. By making a cybersecurity plan, you can address key business imperatives and set priorities including budget, flexibility, scalability, internal resources, and global compliance. And because each tier supports the next, you ensure seamless integration with existing IT environments, minimizing disruption.
Let’s look at these cybersecurity tiers in more detail.
Tier 1 Protection: The foundation of reliable security
What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think of your data protection strategy? Do you have a copy of your data to restore? Where is that data stored, and how will you protect it? Will you replicate the breach if you don’t have clean data? These are important questions that you should ask, long before a data breach becomes a possibility.
Any structure must be built from the ground up, and business continuity is no exception. Tier 1 creates a solid foundation for data protection, protecting your digital assets with three copies of your data on two separate media, one offsite, one immutable, and with verified, zero-error backups. This simple 3-2-1-1-0 rule prevents data loss, protects your business continuity, and ensures regulatory compliance for sensitive data.
Tier 2 Protection: Scaling up to efficient recovery
Once your data backups are in place, you’re ready to scale up to more robust protection methods with advanced features to meet recovery demands. For each type of backup, there are services that enhance those tools to better serve your business and help you achieve your goals while protecting your infrastructure.
Planning for recovery after any kind of data loss is a mature approach to business continuity, and that’s what the 3-2-1-1-0 rule is all about. For on-premise backups, you need to have a copy that’s lockable that no one can alter. An offsite location can store data in an impenetrable location so that no one has access. This is your first level of protection when someone gets inside your organization because you know you have a clean copy to restore your data and remain compliant.
Efficient disaster recovery using real-time virtual machine replication, AI, clean rooms, and other digital tools in your data arsenal, minimizes downtime, protects your reputation, and heads off liability issues. Rapid recovery capabilities protect your mission-critical applications, getting you up and running faster, so your business can resume operations and mitigate financial risks.
Tier 3 Protection: Seamless continuity for high-stakes environments
Consider some of the hidden risks that organizations fail to see. Hackers are patient. They will sit in your data, biding their time, waiting for the most devastating time to act—when stealing or locking down your most valuable data will do the most damage. Make it hard for threat actors to find and access your data by storing it offsite in secure—and unexpected—locations.
Employees and partners with access to your systems sometimes don’t have your best interests at heart. Some are dishonest, and others, simply human, after all, mistakes happen. How can you ensure business continuity when the attack or data loss comes from within? Immutable backups prevent bad actors from accessing your data and accidents from deleting it.
When people rely on your data, you have a responsibility to protect it, and when it’s corrupted, you can’t just delete and start over—unless you have an verified, zero-error uncorrupted copy stored off-site that hackers or unauthorized staff can’t access.
Organizations that are required to maintain seamless continuity for their business, with strict compliance and performance requirements, have obligations to government and regulatory authorities, citizens, consumers, and staff to protect sensitive data. They need the very top level of security with intuitive tools and innovative technologies to ensure the very best in digital protection.
This top tier offers the highest level of protection, with advanced disaster recovery, complex recovery management across multiple platforms, and short recovery points.
The ThinkOn multi-layered strategy: Revolutionizing data protection
Worldwide, cybercrime will cost companies an estimated $10.5 trillion annually by 2025, up from $3 trillion in 2015. i
According to Cybersecurity Ventures, cybercrime “…represents the greatest transfer of economic wealth in history, risks the incentives for innovation and investment, is exponentially larger than the damage inflicted from natural disasters in a year, and will be more profitable than the global trade of all major illegal drugs combined.”
ThinkOn’s tiered approach to business continuity helps you plan for a safer data future, where the fear of cyber threat is replaced by a reliable and comprehensive protection plan that allows your data to thrive. We help you adapt to new security threats while supporting innovation and growth, letting you accelerate digital transformation and help your business grow.
Here’s what the ThinkOn multi-layered approach to business continuity offers:
Flexibility and scalability
- The tiered approach allows businesses to scale security as needed, adding layers of protection without disrupting existing systems. This flexibility helps organizations respond quickly to new challenges.
Proactive security
- Moving from reactive to proactive, this strategy ensures that as threats evolve, your protection does too, minimizing risks and ensuring rapid recovery with BaaS and other as-a-service tools that protect your budget as well as your data.
Business continuity and innovation
- ThinkOn’s modular tech stacks not only safeguard your data but also support continuous innovation, enabling growth while ensuring your security remains resilient. ThinkOn’s Compass™ InfoSearch with homomorphic encryption provides air-gapped cold storage that is fully searchable, so you can take advantage of advanced data analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning all while protecting the underlying data from present and future threats.
Ready to start planning your integrated DRP with multi-layered protection? ThinkOn is here to help!
i. Cybercrime Magazine, 2024. Steve Morgan, “Cybercrime to cost the world $10.5 trillion annually by 2025” https://cybersecurityventures.com/hackerpocalypse-cybercrime-report-2016/