How to Create an Effective Cybersecurity Business Continuity Plan

You may hope you never need it, but a business continuity plan is a necessity to keep your business running in the event of a compromising cyberattack or security event. That may also include a single office being offline because of a natural disaster, or the pandemic, the last thing you want to do in the middle of a crisis is to begin preparing a plan.

This article will discuss the importance of implementing a business continuity plan, what it is, and the key steps you should take to create one for your individual business.

What Is a Business Continuity Plan & Why Is It Important?

Business continuity refers to maintaining business functions or in the event of a major disruption, quickly resuming them, including malicious and damaging cyber attacks. A business continuity plan outlines procedures and instructions an organization must follow by covering business processes, assets, human resources, business partners, and more.

While a disaster recovery plan is comparable to a business continuity plan, a disaster recovery plan focuses mainly on restoring IT infrastructure and operations after a crisis. It’s actually just one part of a complete business continuity plan, as a business continuity plan looks at the continuity of the entire organization. Your company’s future depends on your people and processes and being able to handle threats effectively can have a positive effect on your company’s reputation and market value, while also increasing customer confidence. 

Businesses of all sizes in every industry sector are being targeted with advanced attacks designed to deceive victims into sharing credentials, financial information, and other sensitive data that can be exploited for monetary gain. Cybercriminals are taking advantage of the increase in remote workers using inadequately secured cloud platforms such as Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace  - to craft dangerous attack campaigns which capitalize on urgency and fear. Email risk is universal - especially in this heightened digital threat environment. 

Cyberattacks can have serious consequences for businesses, and 56% of Americans are unaware of what steps to take to prevent or in the event of a data breach. Businesses that store their customer’s data online are becoming increasingly vulnerable to attacks. Some of the most critical ways cybercrime can affect businesses today include: 

Increased Costs 

Organizations looking to protect themselves from hackers have to pay a price to do so. Firms may face expenses such as cybersecurity technology and expertise, notifying affected parties of a breach, insurance premiums, and public relations support.

Operational Disruption 

In addition to financial damages, businesses often face indirect costs from cyberattacks, such as a major operations interruption that can result in lost revenue.

Reputational Damage 

It’s difficult to conclude on a definite number, however, companies that fall victim to larger cyberattacks may find their brand equity significantly damaged. Customers may feel less safe leaving their sensitive information with a company that has experienced broken IT infrastructure.

Lost Revenue 

A cyberattack can result in a sudden drop in revenue, as customers move away from targeted companies to protect themselves from cybercrime. Companies may also lose money to hackers who try to extort their victims.

Despite the existing email protection provided by Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP) in Microsoft 365, 85% of users have experienced an email data breach over the past year. Increased reliance in cloud email usage creates critical security gaps in EOP such as static and single-layered protection that is unable to anticipate emerging attacks, a lack of customization for businesses’ individual security needs, homogeneous architecture that allows attackers to bypass defenses, and difficulty to securely configure.

Anatomy of a Business Continuity Plan

If your organization doesn’t have a business continuity plan in place, start by assessing your business processes, determining which areas are vulnerable, and the potential losses if those processes go down. Developing a plan involves six general steps including:

• Identify the scope of the plan
• Identify key business areas
• Identify critical functions
• Identify dependencies between various business areas and functions
• Determine acceptable downtime for each critical function
• Create a plan to maintain operations

Best Practices for a Secure & Effective Business Continuity Plan

To efficiently protect and provide a business the capability to recover quickly from unexpected disasters, a properly constructed BCP is a necessity. The following best practices should be kept in mind when designing and implementing an effective business continuity plan:

Determine business impact analysis

A business impact analysis (BIA) is a systematic process to determine and evaluate the potential effects of an interruption to critical business operations as a result of a disaster, accident or emergency. A BIA is an essential component of an organization's business continuity plan that includes a testing element to reveal threats and vulnerabilities and develop strategies to minimize risk. 

During the business impact analysis process, the elements of the risk management process must also be considered. Teams should factor cyber threats and risks into their impact categories, including reputation, revenue loss, customer service and experiences, legal or regulatory standards, and increases in operational costs as a result of an attack. By determining the potential scope of impact, organizations can make an informed decision to maintain business continuity in the event of an attack.

Conduct a cybersecurity risk assessment

Risk assessment identifies the potential risks, threats, and vulnerabilities to a business's continued operations. This includes threats such as natural disasters, supplier failures, power outages, and cyberattacks. The assessment identifies areas of vulnerability, such as failure points.

Consider supply chain and third-party risk management

Securing your supply chain is vital for any organization in order to protect its revenue, reputation, and ability to continue performing its essential operations. Fortunately, managing supply chain risk can be accomplished by completing four steps: put someone in charge; identify your critical vendors; identify the risks to your critical vendors; mitigating the risks to your supply chain.

Mitigate downtime with an incident response and crisis communication plan

Because there is such a ride range of potential damge cybersecurity attacks can cause to an organization’s legal, financial, and reputational wellbeing, ensuring that your organization can return to business as usual as quickly as possible requires an incident response plan in place. This plan should facilitate an efficient response to security incidents by detailing what needs to be done and who needs to do it.

Crisis communication is crucial, so your company should implement a strategy that ensures effective communication to both internal and external stakeholders. A detailed communication strategy can help incident response teams efficiently coordinate their efforts.

Maintain complete visibility and continuously monitor

The best way to proactively manage risk and mitigate business continuity concerns is to enable both complete visibility and continuous monitoring. This allows IT security teams to understand the organization’s cyber hygiene, encouraging confident and informed decisions as well as ongoing compliance monitoring. Organizations should leverage solutions that provide comprehensive visibility across their entire network infrastructure, including both vendors and the supply chain.

Test your business continuity plan

Testing a plan is the only way to truly know it will work, a real incident is a true test and the best way to understand if something works. A controlled testing strategy, however, is more comfortable and provides an opportunity to identify gaps and improve.

There is no rule for how often your business should test its plan, instead it depends on the complexity of your business and the number, scale and likelihood of the risks it faces. If your business has high risks for revenue loss, a damaged reputation or the possibility of lengthy downtime, then testing should be carried out more regularly and more areas of the plan should be tested.

Review and improve your business continuity plan

A lot of effort goes into creating and testing a business continuity plan and once that job is complete, some organizations expect it to maintain its usefulness and strength while other tasks are now focused on.

As technology evolves, so should the plan. Bring key personnel together at least annually to review the plan and discuss any areas that must be modified. Prior to the review, ask all departments or business units to review the plan, including branch locations or other remote units. If you’ve had to put the plan into action, be sure to incorporate any lessons from the incident.

Cybersecurity and Business Continuity Are Codependent 

Cyberattacks or data breaches - over 90% of which occur via email - can shake any business to the core. Because of this, prevention is far better than mitigation and effective email security is critically important for the success of your business.

Cybersecurity concerns and business continuity are intertwined, especially as we see cyberattacks and data breaches disrupting increasingly more organizations due to lost data, compromised personal or financial information and unplanned downtime. A single cybersecurity event can result in lost productivity, decreased revenue, and a damaged reputation.

There’s no denying that cybersecurity and business continuity were once considered two separate entities altogether. Today they should ideally work together to minimize costs, protect data, and streamline a timely and effective response to any attacks or data breaches.

Keep Learning 

With the information and tips provided in this article, you should be equipped to create a secure and effective business continuity plan for your organization.

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