WHEN DISASTER STRIKES
YOU WILL SAVE
BUSINESS
Become a Certified Disaster Recovery Professional (E|DRP)
Cyber Security
Ethical Hacking
Penetration Testing
- What is Penetration Testing?
- Types of Penetration Testing
- Penetration Testing Steps
- What Happens After a Penetration Test?
- Popular Penetration Testing Tools
- Benefits of Penetration Testing
- Responsibilities of a Penetration Tester
- Is Penetration Testing a Lucrative Career?
- Become an Industry-Ready Penetration Tester With C|PENT
- Insights From Successful C|PENT Students
- Frequently asked questions (FAQ)
Network Security
- What is Network Security?
- What is a computer network and its components?
- What are Network Threats?
- What are the Types of Network Security Attacks?
- What is Network Security Vulnerability?
- Network Protocols and its types
- What are the various network security techniques?
- How do you analyze network traffic?
- Requisites of a Network Security training program
Digital Forensics
- What is Digital Forensics?
- What are the steps involved in Digital Forensics?
- Who is a Digital Forensics Investigator?
- History of Digital Forensics
- What are the phases of Digital Forensics?
- What are the best Digital Forensics Tools?
- What are the job profiles in Digital Forensics?
- What are the challenges that a Computer Forensic Analyst faces?
- Requisites of a Digital Forensics training program
SOC
Disaster Recovery
- What Is a Business Continuity Plan?
- What are the aspects of a Business Continuity Plan?
- What are the key components of a Business Continuity Plan?
- What is Disaster Recovery?
- Importance of a Disaster Recovery Plan
- Disaster Recovery Plan Vs Business Continuity Plan
- How can AI predict disasters?
- Significance of a certified and skilled cybersecurity workforce
- Top Certifications in Business Continuity
Incident Response
- What is Incident Response?
- Why Is Incident Response Important?
- What should an incident response plan include?
- What is an Incident Response Process?
- Phases of the incident response lifecycle
- What is an Incident Response Plan?
- Building an Incident Response Team
- Best Incident Response Tools
- How to Become a Certified Incident Handler?
Threat Intelligence
- What is Threat Intelligence in Cybersecurity?
- Who is A Cyber Threat Intelligence Analyst?
- What Are The Types of Threat Intelligence?
- Creating a Cyber Threat Intelligence Program
- How Do You Implement Cyber Threat Intelligence?
- Planning for a threat intelligence program
- What is A Threat Intelligence Feed?
- How do you use cyber threat intelligence?
- How Do You Become a Threat Intelligence Analyst?
DOS Attacks
Cloud Security
CCISO
Enterprise Architect
What Is A Business Continuity Plan and How Is It Used?
A business continuity plan refers to the processes and procedures that experts follow to ensure status quo in the event of a disruption. Simply put, business continuity is an organization’s ability to maintain essential functions during and after a disruption has occurred. Disaster Recovery, on the other hand, is a subset of business continuity, which focuses more on keeping all engines of the business running despite the disaster.
With the COVID-19 outbreak, it is more critical than ever for businesses to deploy a robust business continuity plan to deal with any eventuality that they could be faced with, and how this plan will allow them to mobilize workforce and continue to run.
What is a Business Continuity Plan?
A business continuity plan is created based on business objectives, thereby helping an organization establish a more coordinated secured and continued operations. Business continuity plans help organizations deal with risk and adjust automatically to ensure continuous business operation –
What Are The Essential Aspects of A Business Continuity Plan?
Continued Access – A business continuity plan is necessary for accessing required processes and capabilities. It allows businesses to access applications, despite challenges due to their inherent failures. These failures could be due to business processes in the existing IT infrastructure or physical facilities.
Continuous operations – The Business Continuity plan helps organizations perform efficiently even during disruption and planned outages.
Disaster recovery – It establishes an itinerary to recover from a disaster and helps a data center that has become partially or fully inoperable, recover.
What Are The Key Components of A Business Continuity Plan?
01
Strategy
Strategic objects used by businesses to complete day-to-day activities to ensure continuous operations.
02
Organization
Objects related to the overall structure, skills, communications, and responsibilities of employees.
03
Applications and data
Objects for crucial software applications and data necessary for businesses to operate.
04
Processes
Objects related to IT processes for smooth business operations. Objects for critical business processes to run the business.
05
Technology
Objects related to systems, network, technology architecture to assure continuous operations and secure backup of applications and data.
06
Facilities
Objects seeking an alternate disaster recovery site when the primary site is destroyed.
07
People
Objects related to staff, employee’s turnover, and human resource management.
The business continuity plan is a blueprint to be referred during the crisis with defined strategies to deal with the effects. These key elements play a vital role in creating an effective business continuity plan.
How to Create an Effective Disaster Recovery Plan in 5 Steps?
Identifying Business Continuity Risks
Understanding IT infrastructure is required to identify business continuity risks. The key points to incorporate when determining their scope are –
- Critical information to maintain business operations.
- Critical systems to maintain business operations.
- Critical part of the network to maintain business operations.
- Critical software to maintain business operations.
- Natural disaster risks that impact critical systems, software, and networks.
- Cyber risks that impact networks, software, and systems.
- Critical third-party services required to maintain business operations.
- In-place controls preventing cyber risks to the crucial systems, networks, and software.
- Off-site data center or data backup recovery service.
- In-transit encryption for remote access when the business is interrupted.
- Availability of endpoint encryption in case of business interruption.
- Defined process to implement emergency administrative authorizations.
Disaster Recovery: An Inevitable Subset Of Business Continuity
“A Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) is a business plan that describes how work can be resumed quickly and effectively after a disaster. Disaster recovery planning is just part of business continuity planning and is applied to aspects of an organization that relies on an IT infrastructure to function.”
– Techopedia
What Are The Types of Disaster Recovery?
Virtualization Disaster Recovery
Virtualization provides flexibility in disaster recovery. Here servers are virtualized independent from the underlying hardware. Therefore, an organization does not need the same physical servers at the primary site as at its secondary disaster recovery site.
Network Disaster Recovery
A network disaster recovery plan identifies specific issues or threats related to an organization’s network operations as a result of network provider problems or disasters caused by nature or human activities.
Cloud-based Disaster Recovery
Cloud disaster recovery enables the backup and recovery of remote machines on a cloud-based platform. Cloud disaster recovery is primarily an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) solution that backs up designated system data on a remote offsite cloud server.
Data Center Disaster Recovery
Data Center Disaster Recovery is the organizational planning to resume business operations following an unexpected event that may damage or destroy data, software, and hardware systems.
Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)
Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) involves third-party cloud-based replication and hosting to provide full environmental recovery in the event of a disaster, with SLAs defining the DRaaS provider’s role and recovery timings. The model is ideally suited to organizations that don’t have the resources to provision, configure and test their DR plans in-house, or invest in and maintain their own off-site DR environment, as well as those businesses with minimal tolerance for downtime.
“Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) is replication and hosting of physical or virtual servers by a third party to provide failover in the event of a man-made or natural catastrophe. Typically, DRaaS requirements and expectations are documented in a service-level agreement (SLA) and the third-party vendor provides failover to a cloud computing environment, either through a contract or on a pay-per-use basis.” TechTarget
Why Should Every Organization Have A Disaster Recovery Plan To Protect Itself?
Perceived and unforeseen threats to operations are always a concern for business owners. In the event of a disaster, the continued operations of an organization depend on the ability of the business to replicate their IT systems and data.
Disaster recovery depicts all the steps involved in planning and adapting to a potential disaster with a plan in place to restore operations while minimizing the long-term negative impact. Good business continuity plans are important to keep a business up and running through interruptions of any kind, including power failures, IT system crashes and natural disasters, and more, thus limiting the short-term negative impact on the company.
Disaster Recovery Plan Vs. Business Continuity Plan
What is the difference between a disaster recovery plan and a contiengency plan?
Though the terms ‘Disaster Recovery’ and ‘Business Continuity’ are used interchangeably, they are not similar. Both are different concepts with different strategies, contributing significant aspects of securing business operations.
What is Disaster Recovery?
A disaster recovery plan restores data and critical applications when business systems are unavailable.
What is Business Continuity?
A business continuity plan is more of a strategy. It enables operational continuance with minimal downtime and services, or outage.
The key difference between DR and BC
Achieving a balance between the two strategies is based on the matter of priorities. When your business is mostly online, data security becomes your priority. In the case of a data breach, your business operations may freeze. The competitive intelligence would disappear, making it difficult to make transactions with vendors and customers, and access your inventory information.
The key difference can be identified when the plan is in the implementation stage. Business continuity enables operations to function during the event and aftermath. Whereas, disaster recovery defines how to respond to the event and to return to the normal business phase. While both functionally incorporate a measured response, disaster recovery aims to re-establish the business operations. Though a few areas overlap, they remain distinct in their operation.
Requirements To Incorporate Disaster Recovery Planning
After creating a list of risks associated with potential systems, software, and networks, the policies should be considered to enable business recovery from the interruption stage. The key points to be raised as a part of recovery planning are –
- Responsible individuals to require performing the recovery task.
- A timeline for recovery.
- Documentation that proves complete recovery.
- Defined process to implement data recovery.
- Documented chain of command for recovering from the event.
- Complying with a timeline for recovery.
- Measuring compliance with the user authorization policy.
- Measuring the efficacy of incident response.
- Documenting corrective actions.
- Managing the reinstation process aftermath of the event.
Make sure your disaster recovery plan works when you need it!
How Can AI predict Disasters?
The benefit of using Artificial Intelligence in Disaster Recovery
In a digital world where disasters are more certain, the amount of downtime may warn your business performance. Where the brands cannot afford to have unforeseen downtime, the disaster recovery plans should be aligned to handle and enhance AI-based strategies.
AI can predict potential outcomes
The tools used by AI to assess potential threats like deep neural networks are far more advanced than what could be done manually. This makes it easier for the AI system to determine threats and create robust and powerful disaster prevention and recovery plans.
AI contributes to better protection
An AI-enhanced plan can help strategists draft a better plan for disaster recovery. It uses techniques like ‘business impact analysis’ and ‘risk assessment.’
AI automates the disaster recovery process
AI can be used to automate and control various parts of disaster recovery and business continuity plans. It does not only help prevent issues from arising, but also adapts to new data to make it predictive analysis effective.
AI enhances incident response actions
AI can quickly analyze the reason behind the attack and can be programmed to initiate an auto-recovery action.
AI learns from each incident
The more AI is exposed to data to handle downtime and outages, the better they will learn to register the issues of downtime.
AI enhances incident response actions
AI can quickly analyze the reason behind the attack and can be programmed to initiate an auto-recovery action.
Emerging technologies shaping the business continuity and disaster recovery landscape
The concepts of business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) ensure continuity of business operations so that the organizations don’t need to face negative impacts. In order to continue the same, various technologies have entered the picture. Here are the few emerging technologies that will change the business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) landscape.
- Use of virtualization as it makes the restoration easier in case of an incident.
- Backing up data and recovery for mobile users that broadens the disaster recovery landscape.
- Disc-based backup solutions for the massive amount of data being stored on huge data centers.
- Disc-based backup solutions for the massive amount of data being stored on huge data centers.
3 Things that can happen in the absence of disaster recovery plan
“94% of companies suffering from a catastrophic data loss do not survive – 43% never reopen and 51% close within two years.”
Effect on business continuity leading to a major loss.
Extreme financial and reputational loss.
The cost of a data breach creates an additional burden.
3 Steps to a sound disaster recovery plan
As an organization, taking precautions against any ill-advised act is a must. So is maintaining a sound disaster recovery plan, important to ensure business continuity.
Step 1
Step 2
Step 3
Understand what is important
Choose a technique and document the plan
Constantly update your recovery plan
3 Tips to build a strong disaster recovery plan
Organizations spend a lot of money to build defensive security strategies, and yet they fail, leaving businesses vulnerable to the after-effects of security incidents. So, to build a risk and recovery plan for a cyberattack, firms need to plan ahead on how to stay prepared and protected from cyberattacks.
Tip 1
Stay safe from insider threats as they can cause as much damage as external threats.
Tip 2
Involve the team in the attack mitigation plan.
Tip 3
Document, implement, and regularly update the recovery plan.
The recent pandemic – COVID-19 calls for a strategic business continuity plan
After the rapid spread of COVID–19, arguably, every organization around the world shifted its primary priorities dramatically. As a result, several concerns surfaced, such as disruption in the workforce, daily business operations, and supply chain. A recent report on “business responses to the COVID–19 outbreak” suggests, 51% of enterprises around the globe do not have a business continuity plan. Out of more than 300 businesses, half of the organizations are not ready to combat disasters. Well, with employees working remotely in the wake of coronavirus-themed attacks, companies need a sound IT disaster recovery and business continuity plan.
Business Continuity in the now work from home culture:
Significance Of A Certified and Skilled Cybersecurity Workforce
A certified and skilled cybersecurity workforce always helps strengthen an organization and implement strategic plans and principles to protect its assets. The role of a cybersecurity team majorly focuses on identifying, protecting, detecting, and responding to mitigate the gaps and vulnerabilities in the organization’s network. It is the responsibility of the cybersecurity team along with the disaster management team to implement the following:
A cybersecurity certified team (with a reputed certification like EDRP) to enable communication, collaboration, and co-operation in emergency/disaster management strategies to identify critical assets
- Mitigate the company’s vulnerabilities and threats
- Protect the organization’s data
- Networks and systems
- Perform weekly offsite full system back-ups
- The awareness and training to handle DR and emergency.
- Update the organization’s procedures and policies.
- Monitor internal and external threats
The cybersecurity awareness and training programs help disaster recovery or emergency management teams disrupt two essential operational threats during emergencies
- Vulnerabilities associated with intended and unintended organization’s internal threats due to lack of preparedness towards emergency responses.
- Internal or external threats that cause damage to an organization’s network could go unnoticed until a potential disaster forces an organization to perform restoration of operations.
Disaster recovery IT management and cybersecurity teams work together to train the workforce, create awareness plans, maintain resilience, and enforce operational procedures in the organization.
The question that arises is – how to select the best disaster recovery training from the available choices? One can opt for any business continuity online training. However, there are several points to consider before enrolling in disaster recovery and business continuity programs because the overall objective of the program is to equip us with a skill set that helps us to create a business continuity and disaster recovery plan. The most common assumption while creating such a program is about the audience; only a very few business continuity training is designed in a way that is suitable for beginners, and on the other hand, a few BCP Certifications are designed only for experts.
Primarily, the business continuity plan (BCP) certification/ training must be taken from a well-recognized cybersecurity credentialing body, and secondly, the institution that offers the certifications should have attained globally recognized industry accreditations such as the ISO 17024. An organization must ensure that the course outline of a program they select is aligned with their organizational learning goals.
What To Look For In A Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity Training?
- Business Continuity Management (BCM)
- Business Impact Analysis (BIA)
- Disaster Recovery Planning Process
- System Recovery
- Risk Management
- Recovery Point Objective
- Risk Assessment
- Business Continuity Planning (BCP)
- Data Backup/Recovery Strategies
- Business Continuity Plan (BCP) Review, Maintenance, and Training
- Recovery Time Objective
- Minimum Time of Disruption
Significance Of A Certified and Skilled Cybersecurity Workforce
Here are some of the more popular Business continuity and Disaster Recovery certifications that are recognized by the industry:
EC-Council Certified Disaster Recovery Professional by EC-Council
CBCI by The Business Continuity Institute (BCI)
Business Continuity Management by Certified Information Security
BCLE 2000, BCP 501 & BCP 601 by DRI International, Inc.
What Is EDRP? What Is Its Significance?
The EC-Council Disaster Recovery Program (EDRP) certification is aimed at educating and validating a candidate’s ability to plan, strategize, implement, and maintain the business continuity and disaster recovery plan.
EDRP provides a strong understanding of business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) principles. The program includes business impact analysis, assessing risks, developing policies and procedures, and implementing a plan. It also teaches professionals how to secure data by putting policies and procedures in place and how to recover and restore their organization’s critical data in the aftermath of a disaster.
Disaster recovery is becoming an increasingly important aspect of enterprise computing. As devices, systems, and networks become ever more complex, the number of things that can go wrong has increased exponentially. With the EDRP Certification, chances are that you will be the one helping the business recover every time disaster strikes. Isn’t that a good place to be?
Why EDRP?
Based on the job-task analysis
The program is developed after a thorough job task analysis and market research.
A program designed by SMEs
It is designed and developed by experienced SMEs and business continuity/disaster recovery experts.
Vendor-neutral certification
A complete vendor-neutral course covering business continuity/ disaster recovery techniques and solutions.
Hands-on lab
Detailed labs for a hands-on learning experience. It also offers the provision of the iLab cyber range. The program comes complete with classroom labs or cloud-based virtual labs (optional) enabling students to practice various business continuity/disaster recovery techniques in a realistic simulated environment.
Mapped to NICE Framework and covers various regulatory standards
EDRP covers all the relevant knowledge-based and skills to meets with regulatory compliance standards such as ISO 31000:2009, ISO 22301:2012, ISO 22313:2012, NFPA 1600, and many more along with the NICE Framework.
An additional benefit in the form of whitepapers
The student kit contains a large number of white papers for additional reading.
Case studies for conceptual learning
The course includes case studies for a better explanation of concepts.
Templates to practice
The program includes templates so that the students get a practical idea on how to perform the various analyses and assessments
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the main steps involved in an IT disaster recovery plan?
A – Main steps involved in an IT disaster recovery plan are:
- Risk assessment
- Business impact analysis
- Business continuity planning
- Disaster recovery planning process
- Data backup and recovery
- System recovery
- Business continuity plan review and training
What are the main steps involved in an IT disaster recovery plan?
Does business continuity management certification cover disaster recovery as well?
I want to do a business continuity certification online, does EDRP have an online mode of training?
How important is a certification for a career in business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR)?
What are job opportunities after completing a disaster recovery training program?
I have taken business continuity certifications online, what is the average salary I could expect?
I want to enroll in a disaster recovery training online with a major focus on recovering IT assets. Is EDRP a good option?
Who should enroll for EDRP Program?