Ransomware increases urgency of documented DR plans

Ransomware has moved disaster recovery planning from the back room to the front table. It’s understandable to think you might not get hit by a hurricane, tornado, or earthquake. But thinking your company probably won’t get hit with ransomware is like thinking you’re probably going to win the lottery – neither assumption is true. The odds of a company being hit by ransomware are extremely high, which means you need a solid disaster recovery plan wrapped in an incident response plan.

If my decades in this industry have taught me anything, it’s that merely having backups or replicated copies does not constitute having a bona fide DR plan. I’ve endured critical system recoveries firsthand, and I’ve witnessed what happens when assumptions are made and planning is incomplete. Recovery preparation is nonnegotiable – especially in today’s ransomware-ridden landscape.

Define recovery infrastructure upfront

A proper DR plan is built on the assumption that you’ll probably need to restore data and systems on entirely new infrastructure. The original system could be unavailable because it needs to be retained for forensic reasons, or its hardware is beyond repair. Counting on reusing the same physical servers after an attack or disaster is reckless. It simply might not be possible, so you must be prepared to start a recovery with all new hardware.

That means you need to procure standby equipment or failover hosts ahead of time for temporary deployment post-event. Leveraging cloud infrastructure is one of the best ways to do this, since you can create the configuration up front, but you only pay for it when you need it. What you don’t want is to find yourself scrambling to purchase replacement servers amidst chaos. It will only magnify the crisis. So, know where replacement systems will come from – well before you actually need them.

Safeguard failover environments ASAP

Another thing that people fail to take into account is how to back up the DR site once a failover has happened. Once a cutover to a DR site takes place, whether on-premises or in the cloud, backup of the new environment must begin straight away. The last thing you want is to successfully recover critical systems only to have a secondary ransomware wave impact the DR location because you neglected to create backups. Just like planning to acquire recovery hardware, this is a step that is best done upfront, well before any recovery begins. How you will back up your recovery site must be decided on and designed upfront, and it’s best if you design it in such a way that backups start automatically if you fail over to your recovery site. Never consider the recovery finished until legacy backups are reestablished.

Define tangible recovery timeframe objectives

If you ask the typical business lead what kind of recovery requirement they have, they will say they need an immediate recovery with zero loss of data (i.e. an RPO and RTO of zero). But then they balk at the astronomical costs required to satisfy that requirement. This means you must have the difficult but mandatory discussions regarding genuine recovery time and data loss tolerance thresholds way ahead of time, before disaster strikes. The more you can get C-suite stakeholders to calibrate organizational priorities and balance business continuity needs with actual IT abilities and cost constraints, the more successful your recoveries will be. Remember that “successful” is relative; you will be you successful if you meet the objectives set for you by the business. If those objectives are both realistic and properly funded, you’re on your way to success.