How Redjack Improves Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning
Business continuity and disaster recovery are two separate but closely related concepts that are often discussed as a combined unit using the acronym BCDR.
Business continuity refers to the strategic planning and preparation undertaken by an organization to ensure that critical business functions can continue to operate during and after a disaster or disruption. The goal of business continuity is to minimize downtime, maintain critical operations, and ensure organizational survival.
Disaster recovery is a subset of business continuity that focuses specifically on the IT and technology aspects. It involves creating the processes, policies, and procedures needed to restore critical IT systems and data after a disaster or disruption. The goal is to minimize data loss, restore IT functionality, and ensure that the organization can resume normal operations as quickly as possible.
Both business continuity and disaster recovery are integral components of cyber resilience, working together to ensure an organization's ability to withstand and recover from cyberattacks or other disruptions.
Improving Business Continuity Planning
A business continuity plan documents the strategies needed to ensure the continuation of essential functions during and after a disruption. A risk assessment and business impact analysis are essential to creating an effective business continuity plan. A business continuity plan uses risk prioritization data from the risk assessment and the impact on critical business functions outlined by the business impact analysis to create a plan for how an organization will implement improvements to mitigate their risks and improve their resiliency.
The Redjack cyber resilience platform provides you with the essential elements you need to create an accurate risk assessment and business impact analysis, thus improving your overall business continuity plan.
Total visibility increases risk assessment accuracy
A risk assessment identifies potential risks and threats that could impact your business and evaluates the likelihood and potential impact of each identified risk. Some risks, such as the risk that a successful cyberattack could disrupt business operations, can be partially mitigated by identifying and remediating vulnerabilities and weaknesses in your IT environment.
The Redjack cyber resilience platform uses software sensors in your network to collect communications data. This data is used to discover and provide a comprehensive list of all connected assets within the organization. This includes assets in the cloud, on-premises, or container-based assets. It can even identify third-party assets that communicate with your assets.
Asset discovery and inventory play a crucial role in risk management by providing insights into the security posture of assets and identifying potential security risks associated with unmanaged or unauthorized assets. This allows you to assess the asset's risk profile and use that information to prioritize asset management efforts and implement appropriate security controls based on an asset’s criticality.
The comprehensive visibility provided by the Redjack cyber resilience platform is essential when creating an accurate risk assessment and understanding of what needs protection and monitoring.
Knowing what is critical improves business impact analysis
A business impact analysis identifies and prioritizes critical business functions and determines the impact of disruptions to these functions, including financial, operational, and reputational consequences. An asset inventory is the foundation of an effective business impact analysis. It provides a complete picture of your organization’s entire infrastructure, ensuring that you have the data needed to build realistic recovery plans, perform effective testing, and update your knowledge as your infrastructure grows and changes.
The Redjack cyber resilience platform includes an AI-powered asset discovery and categorization engine capable of not only giving you complete visibility into your connected infrastructure but also mapping the dependencies between assets and between assets and your critical business functions. Understanding these dependencies allows you to more accurately prioritize assets based on their importance to the business and create a more effective business continuity plan.
Improving Disaster Recovery Planning
Asset inventory is a foundational element in disaster recovery planning, offering insights into critical assets, critical business functions, and dependencies. By leveraging this information, you can develop comprehensive and effective strategies to mitigate the impact of disasters and ensure the continuity of essential business operations.
Comprehensive asset discovery, inventory, and prioritization improves planning
The comprehensive asset inventory created by the Redjack cyber resilience platform ensures no assets are missed when setting up backups or making disaster recovery plans. The Redjack platform automatically identifies new assets and dynamically updates the asset inventory so that you can ensure that plans remain current and relevant. It also helps you identify which assets are connected to your critical business functions so you can prioritize and focus disaster recovery efforts on critical assets essential for your business operations.
A constantly updated asset inventory also helps you ensure that new assets are being backed up as needed, and identifying your critical business functions helps you reduce costs by helping prioritize which assets would benefit most from high availability or backup requirements.
Identifying critical business functions improves system redundancy efforts
Implementing redundant systems and infrastructure ensures continuity in case of system failures. However, it is not cost-effective or feasible to make every single system in your environment redundant. Critical IT systems and applications need to be identified and prioritized. This is easier to do if you already have an understanding of your organization’s critical business functions.
Critical business functions are the core activities that keep an organization running smoothly and generate revenue. Understanding which functions are critical allows you to focus your resources and efforts on these areas. The Redjack platform enables you to identify which assets are necessary for the continued operation of your critical business functions so that you can correctly account for them in your disaster recovery planning.
Understanding asset dependencies improves testing
A disaster recovery plan should be regularly tested and updated to ensure its effectiveness. Understanding the interdependencies between different assets is vital to bringing impacted systems back online quickly.
The Redjack platform maps the relationships between systems, helping you identify dependencies that need to be considered in your recovery plan. Understanding which assets depend on other assets to function means that you can bring assets online in the correct order instead of having them crash immediately due to a lack of needed support.
Conclusion
Business continuity and disaster recovery are fundamental components of cyber resilience, crucial for ensuring that organizations can withstand and recover from disruptions effectively. While business continuity focuses on sustaining critical functions during and after disruptions, disaster recovery specifically addresses restoring IT systems and data. Leveraging tools like the Redjack cyber resilience platform enhances both business continuity and disaster recovery planning by providing comprehensive asset visibility, prioritizing efforts based on critical business functions, and dependency mapping. Ultimately, this enables you to build more resilient strategies and effectively manage risks. With the continuous evolution of cyber threats and the ongoing threat of disruptions, integrating robust asset inventory practices into BCDR planning is essential for organizations to adapt and thrive in today's dynamic cybersecurity landscape.
