Cyber Recovery vs Disaster Recovery: What you need to know
Kaushik Ray, Chief Experience Officer, 11:11 Systems, on why traditional disaster recovery plans are no longer enough in the face of modern cyberattacks and what organisations must do to build true cyber- resilience.
Today’s IT leaders face a non-stop escalation of stealthy cyberattacks designed to hold organisations hostage.
The dialogue has shifted from if you will be compromised to when. The financial stakes are incredibly high. According to a 2024 study by Splunk and Oxford Economics, “outages cost businesses over US$400 billion in revenue each year.”
For many Technology decision-makers, the instinct is to rely on traditional disaster recovery plans. However, a cyberattack creates a ‘fog of war’ that makes it distinct from a natural disaster.
For example, you might not know where you were hit, what data was stolen or if the threat is still active in your environment. To survive, organisations must evolve from simple recovery to true cyber-resilience.
Why traditional recovery falls short
Recovering from a ransomware event is fundamentally different from recovering after a flood or power outage. In a traditional disaster, you restore from a backup and resume operations. In a cyber event, restoring from a backup might reintroduce the malware that caused the outage in the first place.
True cyber resilience requires a holistic blend of people, processes and technology. To rebuild securely, you need more than just a backup, you need a plan.
A thoughtful strategy can bridge this gap, providing a blueprint for resilience that not only outlines recovery steps but ensures your business can continue running, even in the immediate face of a significant cyber threat.
Know your data
You cannot protect what you do not understand. A foundational step toward resilience is a thorough inventory and vital data assessment. Before you can effectively plan a recovery, it is essential to identify your critical applications and understand the dependencies that keep them running smoothly.
This means analyzing which applications are vital to your operations and pinpointing the interconnected systems or processes they rely on.
For example, a critical application might depend on a specific database, network infrastructure or third-party service to function properly.
Without this clarity, any recovery plan risks overlooking key elements that could hinder a successful restoration.
Using automated discovery and dependency mapping, IT teams can visualise which applications rely on specific infrastructure. This allows you to set clear thresholds for organisational readiness and prioritise the order of recovery, ensuring that mission-critical systems come back online first.
The importance of immutable, air-gapped backups
Having a backup is standard practice. However, having a backup that a hacker cannot touch, that is true cyber-resilience.
Threat actors frequently target backup repositories to block recovery and force ransom payments. To counter this, your data must be immutable and air-gapped. Immutability ensures your backups cannot be altered, encrypted or deleted by attackers.
Air-gapping adds another layer of security by separating backups from the production network, effectively removing the attack vector. This is important because it eliminates the potential pathway that attackers could exploit to compromise a system, ensuring greater security and reducing the risk of breaches.
Testing without disruption
A major gap in many resilience strategies is a lack of testing. Many organisations avoid disaster recovery tests because they require shutting down production environments or consuming significant internal resources.
With only 41% of businesses testing their disaster recovery plan regularly, this creates untested plans which often will fail when they are needed most.
Best practices suggest quarterly assessments to ensure readiness. Managed solutions simplify this process by allowing for fully managed, non-disruptive testing. This gives your team the utmost confidence in your recovery capabilities without impacting daily business operations.
The clean room advantage
Perhaps the most critical difference between disaster recovery and cyber recovery is the need for a ‘clean room’.
If you restore a compromised server directly back into production, you risk immediate reinfection. A clean room is an isolated, air-gapped environment where you can recover workloads offline.
This allows for forensic analysis and verification to ensure components are free of malicious code before they are migrated back to the live network.
Building a resilient future
True cyber-resilience requires a shift in strategy. It demands a holistic view that combines offensive threat detection, defensive security measures and a robust recovery capability.
By partnering with experts and utilizing platforms designed specifically for the modern threat landscape, you can ensure that a cyber incident remains a manageable event rather than a business-ending catastrophe.
