In the cybersecurity prospective, small and medium-sized businesses consider that terms incident response and disaster recovery are similar. Many business owners consider that these both are the same things. But according to the cybersecurity prospective and according to the cybersecurity professionals, incident response and disaster recovery are completely different strategies. These both strategies are playing different roles to protect digital assets of the companies. These both cybersecurity strategies are completely different, but both are equally important to protect the businesses.
At Security Tower, we are helping businesses to design and implement both incident response and disaster recovery plans. Our designed incident response plans and disaster recovery guidelines are allowing the businesses to face any cybersecurity challenge that comes their way.
Why the Confusion Exists
The disaster recovery and incident response plan are both targeting the band events, security threats and cybersecurity risks. That’s why there is a confusion that these both strategies are similar. These both are used in different situations to reduce the damage. For example, in ransomware and in natural disasters like flooding, these both terms are used to reduce the damages while working in specific domains.
However, the target and timing of these two approaches are different:
- Incident Response is about managing and controlling the attack while it’s happening and immediately after. Incident response is responsible to protect the assets and respond accordingly before or during the incident.
- Disaster Recovery is about restoring systems and data so business operations can continue. That’s why, disaster recovery plan came into action after the incident.
The incident response is working as an emergency medical treatment after an accident. While the disaster recovery plan is just like a rehabilitation process that gets you back on your feet.
What Is An Incident Response?
Incident response is a well-documented structured approach being used in businesses to identify, contain, and eliminate a cybersecurity incident. The basic goal of this approach is to stop the attack, limit the damage, and prevent the spreading of the attack.
An incident response plan typically includes the following steps:
- Preparation: This is a proactive step to take precautionary measures before an incident occurs. In this preparation step, the monitoring tools are deployed and communication protocols are created for fast and proper reaction. Also the employees training is very important to recognize suspicious activity.
- Detection and Identification: Identifying the signs of an incident is important. This step allowed us to identify unusual login attempts, unusual network traffic, login from unusual locations, malware detection alerts, or suspicious emails etc.
- Containment: After the identification of an attack. The next step or main priority is to block or contain it. This step is helpful to reduce or block further infection of attack. For example, isolating an infected device from the network so the attack doesn’t spread in the whole network.
- Eradication: This step of incident response contains:
- Removing the malicious software.
- Updating the unpatched software.
- Fixing the exploited vulnerability in the infected systems.
- Recovery: Bringing systems back online carefully and making it sure that all systems are secure and all threats are removed.
- Lessons Learned: After successful recovery of the whole system, reviewing what happened and improving the response plan for the future.
At Security Tower, our cyber security consultants guide businesses through every step of this process, making sure response efforts are fast, secure, cost-effective, efficient, and productive.
What Is Disaster Recovery?
The incident response plan is about managing, handling and stopping the attack. While the disaster recovery is able to regain the operation control of the business, it is helpful to get your business fully working and operational again. The recovery of data, restoring of different IT systems, gaining access to the networks, and making the business activities to a normal state are the main outcomes of the disaster recovery.
A professional and well equipped disaster recovery plan includes:
- Data Backups: The backups stored securely offline or in the cloud according to the priorities.
- Restoration Procedures: A perfect disaster recovery plan consists of clear instructions on how to restore systems and data quickly.
- Alternate Workflows: A workable temporary solution to keep critical operations running while full systems are being restored after an incident.
- Testing: Regular mock exercise and drills to ensure backups actually work and staff know what to do.
For example, if there is a ransomwere attack and all your business files are locked, then it is the responsibility of the incident response plan to block or contain the malware and to protect the systems. After that, the disaster recovery plan would step in to restore the files from backup and to recover the deleted files from systems to make sure that the employees can now resume the normal operations.
Why Both Matter
These both plans are completely different, but still some businesses make the mistake of focusing on one strategy. Sometimes they opt for disaster recovery, but they don’t have an incident response and sometimes they opt for an incident response plan, but they don’t have a disaster recovery plan. They need to deploy these both strategies to make their systems truly secure.
For example:
The Incident response plan without disaster recovery is just like stopping a fire, but the damage is not repaired. That’s why a business can remove or contain a threat, but without recovery they can’t start operations or they could remain offline.
Similarly the disaster recovery plan without incident response is just like repairing the damage, but without protecting or ignoring the causes. Hence, the same cyber-attack could target the company again, because the reasons behind the attack are not fixed.
When an incident response plan and disaster recovery plan are together, then they provide a complete defense and accuracy.
- Incident response handles the attack and crisis as it reveals.
- Disaster recovery ensures your business can bounce back quickly after the attack to reduce the down time.
Real-World Example
Imagine your business was running smoothly and suddenly your business was hit with ransomware. The disaster recovery plan and incident response plan must follow:
- Incident Response: Your IT team, or a partner like Security Tower is responsible to identify the ransomware. They disconnect infected systems and remove the malware quickly.
- Disaster Recovery: Once the systems are safe and secure. Then the blocked files or clean backups are restored. Your IT team or partner like Security Tower must make sure that you can restore your business operations with minimized downtime and without paying the ransom.
The Role of Employees
The employee’s role is very important in cybersecurity. Incident response plan and disaster recovery plan are both technical processes and both are handled by IT teams. But there is a huge role of employees in this whole process. Because employees are the first line of cybersecurity defense. If an employee opens a phishing link received via email, then this negligence of the employee might trigger an incident. That’s why training employees is a very important part to protect the assets of the company. If that same employee is properly trained, then he/she might spot the suspicious activity and report it properly quickly. In this way, an attack can be prevented or blocked before it spreads.
The security awareness training is very important to get full advantage of these both plans. It is the responsibility of the businesses to conduct basic security awareness training and employees must know how to recognize the potential attack, how to react, and how to report it.
How Security Tower Helps
At Security Tower, we can understand that small and medium-sized businesses think that they are secure. And also they don’t have time, resources, and expertise to implement incident response plans and disaster recovery plans. Also they are unable to test these plans. That’s where our services come in.
Security Tower provide:
- Incident Response Consulting: Helping businesses design and implement fast, effective response strategies.
- Disaster Recovery Planning: Creating backup and recovery solutions tailored to your business needs.
- Security Awareness Programs: Training your employees so they can be your first line of defense.
- Cyber Security Assessments: Identifying weaknesses in your systems before attackers do.
By combining all these services, we help businesses to improve security and build resilience against latest cyber security threats.
