How would you respond to the question of how much time and thought your organization has dedicated to data recovery? If you’re like many companies, yours is an overly casual or even unconcerned approach. Perhaps you feel you’re doing enough, or that cyber-criminals wouldn’t be interested in your data.
Wrong.
Critical information is critical information, and hackers don’t need any other reason beyond that for working long and hard to find a way into your system. And even if the bulk of hackers would in no way be interested in your business or the data you collect, chances are very high that one day, someone somewhere in the world with access to a computer will try to hack you — just for the heck of it.
Shooting for 100%
Cold truth #1: Hackers want you to be complacent. They are counting on it. In fact, they would love if all organizations everywhere had a “ho-hum” attitude about their data security.
Cold truth #2: Even a single data breach has the potential to ruin your organization. After all, if you cannot offer your customers even a basic guarantee that their critical info will not fall into the hands of hackers via your porous file system — or at least that you’re doing everything you can to prevent breaches — you can offer your customers nothing and may end up out of business.
The first instinct of most organizations that have been hacked is to review its current backup and recovery apparatus. However, many are horrified to discover that their time-to-recover is long, or that their data backups are out of date.
While some might far prefer this scenario to one where they are permanently losing all their data, the goal should always be to recover all data as quickly as possible. Anything less should be considered an abject failure.
Orchestrating your recovery
Even if you know you can recover from a cyber-attack, do you know for sure that your organization is fast enough to recover most or all your data? Or are you in the “I don’t know” category?
If your organization is targeted by bad actors, you must have full confidence that you will come out of it with your data intact; it’s not good enough to fall back on “mean time to recovery” estimates. Today’s systems being as complex as they are, you need to know that you can not only recover but recover quickly, to minimize the impact.
Orchestration is the ability to have all the pieces of your complex data systems working together, creating an intelligent workflow comprised of individual automated actions or patterns — with an awareness of the entire workflow process. Orchestration is the ability of each piece to automatically and intelligently do the right thing at just the right time.
IBM webinar
Join Jim Love, IT World Canada CIO, and Peter Gladwish, Business Unit Executive, Resiliency Services, IBM, in the webinar “Orchestrating your recovery — the next big challenge” on June 8, 2017. In this session, Love and Gladwish will discuss how IT orchestration can help organizations more efficiently manage their IT resiliency environment.
You can find out more about this webinar here.