While the goal of IT security is to prevent cyberattacks, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) need to be prepared to recover quickly if a breach is successful. Rapid recovery lessens the economic and reputational impact of a breach. Resilient companies can recover from a security incident in hours instead of weeks or months.
SMBs are particularly vulnerable to ransomware attacks because they can’t afford either the ransom or the downtime required to fix the problem themselves. That’s why SMBs need to increase their resiliency with a backup and recovery strategy that is reliable and can meet tight recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO).
Why Resiliency Is Crucial for SMBs
SMBs may make the mistake of assuming that cybercriminals have bigger fish to fry. The truth is that hackers target SMBs with ransomware and other attacks, knowing that smaller companies lack the resources to recover their systems.
Hackers sometimes lowball the ransom, figuring that a smaller business will pay up instead of spending the time and money needed to fix the problem themselves.
A single attack involving a data breach, malware, ransomware, or distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack can cost businesses with 50 to 249 employees an average of $184,000. Many of these targeted organizations go out of business within six months.
Resiliency solutions enable SMBs to recover from an attack by ensuring that data is backed up and stored in a location where it cannot be encrypted or compromised by malware.
What Is Resiliency?
Data protection solutions promote resiliency by ensuring business continuity after an attack. Business continuity and availability are important for SMBs because they are markers of reliability and trustworthiness. Customers want to know that your small business is available to them whenever and wherever they need you.
Data protection promotes resiliency using backup and recovery solutions. As the term resiliency suggests, data protection allows your company to bounce back after a traumatic incident by recovering lost data and restoring compromised data to its original state.
Backup and Disaster Recovery for SMBs
Recovering from a cybersecurity attack requires that your company restore critical assets, such as mission-critical data. Not only should your SMB have a reliable backup in place, but you must have a comprehensive and tested disaster recovery plan.
Smaller companies can start by creating a backup and recovery plan according to the basic 3-2-1 backup rule. The 3-2-1 rule involves:
- Creating three backups of your critical data, one primary and two copies
- Having two different backup locations—disk, tape, cloud, etc.
- Using one location that is geographically separated from your production data
Cloud-based backup and disaster recovery help you follow the 3-2-1 rule and meet RTO and RPO targets. With cloud backup and recovery and disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS), SMBs can achieve instant failover and synchronize backups to restore data to its current state.
Achieving Resiliency at Your SMB
Taking a proactive approach to cybersecurity is ideal, but not every attack can be prevented. When a cyberattack does occur, having data protection solutions in place to support resiliency will keep your company up and running.
Derive Technologies can help your SMB become more resilient. We provide backup and recovery as part of our managed services and offer periodic testing for restoration services to ensure that your company can stay available no matter what.
As a Cisco Premier Certified Partner, we also have the certified expertise needed to support your data protection and resiliency solutions.
Learn more about increasing resiliency at your organization. Request a free security assessment from Derive Technologies.
blog
