Disaster Recovery versus Cyber Recovery

Twice as many people work from home today as before the pandemic began. As a result, the complexity of IT infrastructures has also increased dramatically over the past two years. While many organisations have managed to roll out remote work quickly, they often still rely on recovery strategies that are not aligned with today’s complex infrastructures. On top of that, the number of cyberattacks increased by 50% in 2021. This is why a relatively new approach is emerging in the IT sector—Cyber Recovery. In this blog, we explain the difference between Disaster Recovery and Cyber Recovery and why both should be an important part of your security strategy.

Disaster Recovery (DR) has played a decisive role in the IT sector for many years. DR strategies ensure the continuity of organisations and in a world where your organisation needs to be accessible to colleagues, patients or customers 24/7, these are essential. After all, expectations have changed in recent years. Disaster Recovery ensures that your business-critical activities and services remain available.

Suppose a fire occurs and one of your infrastructure sites is hit, causing major damage to your systems and business processes. You will need a DR strategy to get you through the unthinkable. When you create a Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP), you are defining guidelines that describe how your organisation can resume operations as soon as possible after a disaster.

Disaster recovery – Only one piece of the puzzle

Natural disasters are thankfully rare in the Netherlands. Smaller events like deleting a critical file are usually resolved with a good backup solution, but as important as Disaster Recovery is, it’s only part of the solution.

Because of the increasing number of threats—a 50% rise in 2021 compared to 2020—a different type of recovery is also needed today and that is Cyber Recovery (CR). The major difference between the two is that with Disaster Recovery, you want to get all the data back up and running as quickly as possible, while Cyber Recovery is all about recovering the right pure data. You must, therefore, first check whether the data is clean and where the data breach occurred otherwise the whole thing starts all over again.

Why opt for Cyber Recovery?

ICSecurity Icon While DR is about restoring data and applications from a specific location, CR is about restoring a system or data environment to a specific point in time. This may be a state prior to the deletion or encryption of a file directory by cybercriminals. The difference with DR is that you want to make sure the data is clean before restoring it.

For this, you need to get a few things right. For instance, the data must be isolated , made immutable and be constantly scanned for indicators. This is especially important when you want to restore data. The end goal of Cyber Recovery is to successfully recover data with minimal cost and effort, and to get everything back up and running as quickly as possible.

Cyber Recovery as part of your security strategy

Although Disaster Recovery and Cyber Recovery both have different goals and use different methods and systems, they should both be part of your security strategy. You need to ensure the confidentiality, integrity and availability of your systems and data. Nobody thinks much about backups—until the day comes when you need them.

Could you use help with your Disaster & Cyber Recovery strategy?

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Daan van Mol