With the new year not even into double digit figures, we have already witnessed the impact that evolving technology and cyber security risks can pose to businesses. The news that broke yesterday (7th January 2020) that Travelex, one of the largest companies on the foreign exchange, are being held to ransom by hackers for a reported £4.6M has brought home to many the reality of this threat in today’s digitally enabled and reliant world.
Cyber-attacks are not only increasing in frequency but are also becoming a lot more sophisticated and complex, and this is a trend that many predict will continue to grow throughout 2020 and beyond. The result of which is a growing and essential need for companies to have a robust security and recovery solutions to be in place, and if the start to 2020 is anything to go by, this needs to be priority number one for businesses.
So, what can businesses do to protect against such attacks, and to ensure robust prevention strategies are in place should the worst happen and an attack be successful? This is where backup and recovery solutions can help to minimize business downtime and limit the impact to customer and employees alike. Here are the key things to consider:
Backup: In response to increasingly sophisticated attacks, backup solutions have evolved in order to not only keep up but stay one step ahead. Risk exposure can be reduced with a cloud based solution which enables any time access to a businesses intellectual property.
Speed to recover: This isn’t purely about performing systems back-up, it’s about defining RTOs (Recovery Time Objectives) and RPOs (Recovery Point Objectives) so a business has full visibility of the impact of a security breach and the time it could take to recover after a failure or attack.
Disaster Recovery as a Service: For companies who want additional support, DRaaS can offer peace of mind that critical business assets are protected, secure and fully recoverable taking the headache away from internal teams.
Whatever you choose to do, it’s imperative to ensure you regularly assess the quality of the systems in place to monitor attacks before or as they happen, as greater visibility means it’s possible to act fast in order to get systems and processes up and running as quickly as possible. Any downtime can not only bring financial cost implications but also the cost to brand reputation too – so the priority has to be getting back up and running as quickly as possible.
With 2020 still only days old, this will certainly not to be the only high-profile cyber attack of the year. For the greatest peace of mind going into 2020 and beyond, businesses should not underestimate the state of their IT estate and look to a more fluid use of cloud resources, or migrating to a managed service to ensure their business returns to normal as quickly as possible.
To read more about the predicted trends for 2020 from senior industry experts, including M247 CEO Jenny Davis take a look at Prolific North ‘Next big things for 2020’.
