People are a company’s most important asset. That’s followed incredibly closely by the IT infrastructure. That encompasses your networks and, most critically, your data. If the network is breached and data is held ransom, your people can’t accomplish anything. The business comes to an immediate, costly halt.
Every location across the country represents a fortress that must be defended. Protecting their data protects revenue, brand reputation, customer interests, compliance posture, and investor confidence. Companies must accomplish this across all facilities. For businesses in heavily regulated industries, the protections may also need to include vendor partner environments.
That’s the risk. Now, let’s explore protection and recovery/resiliency strategies for nationwide organizations.
IT Disaster Planning Begins With Identifying Business Impacts
Before asking how to protect your data across locations, determine which data requires protection. That answer should tie directly to the core business operations and compliance/regulation requirements for each facility.
Some Data Matters More
Every company has mission-critical or highly regulated files/databases. That could include personally identifiable information or a business’s financial accounts. Of course, there are other datasets you’d like to protect as well, but any breach to them would cause minimal damage. Those files may include a vendor list.
No breach is acceptable or painless, but some breaches pose greater risks or create opportunities for blackmail.
The Importance of a Business Impact Assessment (BIA)
Every business should conduct a Business Impact Assessment (BIA). It’s a systematic assessment that identifies, quantifies, and prioritizes the effects of an IT disruption. It helps evaluate which data matters have the highest value to your business.
A BIA Answers
- What must survive
- How long can it be down/gone/offline
- What is the cost per hour of it being down/gone/offline/held ransom
Completing a BIA provides clear insights into which data is your highest priority for protecting to ensure ongoing business operations.
Outputs of a BIA
- Recovery Time Objectives: How quickly must a data set be restored?
- Recovery Point Objective: What amount of data loss is acceptable?
- Maximum Tolerable Downtime: What is the absolute survivable outage limit?
The answers to those questions will vary by your locations and facility operations. Again, not all data and functions are equal. But there are some universal standards to consider. For example, payments likely need to resume within minutes, while HR systems could wait a couple of days. Meanwhile, marketing systems could be down for days without significantly impacting business operations.
Understanding and prioritizing your business’s data and needs, both by location and as a whole, and focusing on operations are the critical first steps in building a disaster recovery plan.
IT Resilience for Large Enterprises: The Risk Factors and Breach Points
Many scenarios put company data at risk. Some are manmade, others are acts of nature. Just as there are different levels of data, there are also different levels of threats. What’s more, not every company is prone to the same type of attacks.
Any good security and recovery plan is tailored to the company and location, and must account for the types of attacks it needs to defend against.
Data Threat Categories
Cyber
- Ransomware
- Data exfiltration
- Supply chain compromise
- Corporate espionage/insider threats
Natural Disasters
- Storms (tornadoes, hurricanes, blizzards, etc.)
- Earthquakes
- Floods
- Wildfires
Infrastructure
- Power outage
- ISP outage
- Vandalizing the fiber optic connection
Beyond identifying threats to your data across facilities nationwide, companies must also account for regulatory and political risks, including data residency laws, regional compliance requirements, and the risk of government intervention.
Create a Multi-Tier Recovery Architecture for Nationwide IT Continuity
It’s impossible to address all recovery needs simultaneously. Recovery happens in phases, repairing the most important damage first. The order in which operations are returned to normal status is determined by the established recovery architecture.
Recovery Architecture Example
Tier 0: Mission Critical (Recovery in Minutes)
- Active data centers
- Real-time replication
- Automated failover
- Zero or near-zero recovery point objective (RPO)
Tier 1: Business Critical (Recovery in Hours)
- Warm standby environments
- Daily snapshot replication
- Manual but partially scripted failover
Tier 2: Operational Systems (Recovery in Days)
- Backup-based restoration
- Off-site encrypted storage
- Cold recovery
Establishing a tiered model helps companies prioritize actions, control costs, and protect revenue-generating systems.
Rely on Multi-Region Data Centers
Disasters/attacks rarely hit nationwide. Most are limited to a city area, perhaps a region, and sometimes a state. Your best protection, therefore, is geography. All recovering backups should be housed in a data center located 300-500 miles from your locations. Farther away is even better. Why does distance make a difference? Distance can mean separate power grids, different telecom/broadband/fiber-optic carriers, unique flood zones, and other benefits. Creating a distance buffer between your data source and the archives helps minimize damage and accelerate recovery.
Best Practices for Archiving Strategies
Archiving is good. Archiving with a proven strategy for rapid recovery across all locations is better. When planning your disaster recovery strategy, be sure to follow these guidelines — or do even better.
- 3 Copies of data
- 2 different types of media
- 1 offsite copy
- 1 immutable (can not be altered) copy. Essential for ransomware attacks.
- 0 backup errors verified by testing
Best Practices Against Cyber Attacks
A cyberattack is an intentional attempt to access your data files for malicious purposes — often for blackmail/ransom. It’s among the most malicious and harmful threats a business can face.
Strongly advised cyber security measures:
- Immutable backups
- Air-gapped recovery vault
- Multi-factor authentication for backup systems
- Segmented recovery network
- Separate administration credentials for the disaster recovery environment
Businesses must prevent attackers from accessing backups. They are the foundation of any disaster recovery plan. If they become tainted, the whole plan fails.
Businesses should also consider some emerging/modern trends in recovery. Some of the most popular ideas to discuss with an IT expert include:
- Cloud-based disaster recovery as a service
- Immutable object storage
- Zero-trust network segmentation
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC) for rapid rebuilds
- Automated failover orchestration
- AI-based anomaly detection
- Hybrid models include an on-premises core with a cloud recovery tier
Rapid Disaster Recovery Starts With Roles and Protocols
Every disaster recovery plan must assign roles and protocols before an incident occurs. Having these people and tasks established enables the fastest possible response with the fewest people asking, “What now?”
Roles
- Incident Commander
- Technical Lead
- Communication Lead
- Legal and Compliance
- Executive Sponsor
Communication Protocols
- Media response
- Regulatory reporting
- Customer notifications
Test Instead of Trust
Many disaster recovery plans look excellent on paper. But issues arise when called upon in a real situation. Why? The plan was never tested until it was needed. That’s a massive mistake.
Essential Recovery Tests
- Tabletop: A decision-making simulation.
- Technical Failover: Validates system recovery capabilities.
- Partial Live Test: Restore a specific subset or systems
- Full-Scale Simulation: Enterprise-wide rehearsal
Testing will reveal potential issues with your resiliency plan. Businesses often encounter shortcomings in documentation, credential access, system dependencies, and bandwidth bottlenecks.
Ready to Future-Proof Your Business With IT Disaster Recovery Consulting
Creating a disaster recovery plan that covers all your locations is essential to future-proofing a business’s ongoing operations. Identifying and deploying the best approach to achieve it requires working with an expert. Matrix-NDI solves the challenges of your business operations by unlocking the full ROI of your technology investments. We design and install networks built for maximum speed and perfectly matched to bandwidth demands.
Why Work With Matrix-NDI?
We have on-staff Registered Communications Distribution Designers (RCDD), coast-to-coast service, and elite data networking partners, including Extreme Networks, Nile, and others. Ultimately, Matrix-NDI aligns your business with the devices, internet service, and software to achieve all technical objectives. We invite you to reach out with your needs and see how our expertise, partnerships, and national scale can be leveraged to solve them.
Contact Matrix-NDI to get started. Let’s build smarter, safer, more connected spaces — together.
