How to Create an Effective IT Resilience Plan With Offsite Storage

Resiliency is a popular buzzword in the business world – but a startling number of people have no idea what it means. Constructing an IT resilience plan requires understanding this concept and how to build it into your existing business operations.

Developing IT resiliency enables your systems to adapt to any situation, continue to operate under stress, and ultimately protect your business from harm. This guide will discuss IT and data resilience and how offsite storage fits into your overall strategy.

What is IT Resilience?

Resilience appears to be the word of every day, but businesses often make the mistake of assuming it’s the same thing as disaster recovery and business continuity. On the contrary, these two concepts play into ensuring the overall strength of your IT resilience plan.

Making things more confusing is the fact there are multiple definitions of IT resiliency. Let’s focus on the definitions provided by the Computer Security Resource Center from the National Institute of Standards and Technology:

  1. The ability of an information system to continue operating under adverse conditions or stress in a degraded state while maintaining its essential operational capabilities.
  2. The ability of an information system to continue to operate while under attack and recover its operational capabilities quickly.
  3. The ability of an information system to adapt and recover from unknown and unknown changes to its environment using risk management and contingency planning.

These abridged definitions show that your IT system must maintain critical operations even during successful attacks. As you can see, it’s about building a system that can resist everything from natural disasters to cyberattacks.

The distinction is that none of this happens unless you have cutting-edge disaster recovery and business continuity plans. With more than 343 million cyberattack victims in 2023 alone, this is easier said than done.

Download the Disaster Recovery Plan Template

The Role of Offsite Storage in Data Resiliency

Offsite storage is the classic example of not keeping all your eggs in one basket. Maintaining an offsite storage facility contributes to system resilience by providing a secure location for your data.

Even if your main office/facility was wiped off the face of the planet tomorrow, the presence of a secure, remote location containing your data enables you to get back online. With the average cost of downtime per year from lost revenue and functionality reaching $87 million, offsite storage could keep your business’s doors open.

But offsite storage isn’t purely about the cloud. It’s also about building layers into your resiliency planning through other means, including media vaulting and rotational services. These are the heart and soul of a genuinely defensible storage program.

  • Media Vaulting– Securing and storing data on physical media in climate-controlled vaults, such as hard drives and tapes.
  • Backup Rotational Services – Rotating and updating stored media to ensure the latest data is secured in your data vault to minimize data loss and support your recovery and continuity strategies.

Maintaining a diverse mix of data storage strategies adds further strings to your bow and secures your data even further. This is the essence of any resilience strategy, ensuring your business is ready for fires, floods, and cyberattacks.

Steps to Develop a Strategic IT Resilience Plan

Starting your journey to a comprehensive IT resilience plan means starting from the bottom. It includes an assessment of where you are and where you need to be.

If you’re ready to develop your resilience strategy, follow these steps.

1. Assess Current IT Infrastructure

All plans begin by understanding where you are and establishing a baseline. Consult with your IT team and assess your existing IT systems. During the process, pinpoint any potential vulnerabilities and anything else that’s degrading your overall resiliency.

Some aspects to focus on include:

  • Documenting hardware/software
  • Defining your IT budget
  • Focusing on data management processes
  • Reviewing security protocols
  • Assessing your IT team’s capabilities

2. Define Critical Business Functions and Potential Weak Points

What are your most critical business functions? These are the operations that are core to your organization’s ability to operate. Typically, your critical functions are the ones that are:

  1. Most sensitive to downtime.
  2. Fulfill your legal/financial functions to maintain cash flow.
  3. Pivotal to ensure your market share and reputation.
  4. Crucial for safeguarding your most important assets.

With your business functions defined, it’s time to identify any weak points within this infrastructure. Define what would happen if anything within these areas failed and its impact on your overall system.

3. Establish Recovery Objectives

Recovery objectives act as the heart of any IT resilience plan. Typically, you should focus on two key metrics:

  • Recovery Time Objective (RTO) – RTO is the maximum acceptable amount of time your systems can be down without impacting your most important business operations.
  • Recovery Point Objective (RPO) – RPO is the threshold for acceptable data loss.

The answers to both of these metrics will differ for every business. Setting these objectives in stone for every system will enable you to minimize data loss and restore your systems as quickly as possible if something goes wrong.

4. Implement Offsite Storage Solutions

Offsite storage solutions defend your data by maintaining it within a secure, remote facility. Regardless of how bad the disaster is, offsite storage ensures you’re fully protected from localized disasters.

Ideally, you want multiple storage options, including the cloud, media vaulting, and offline tape storage. Choosing the right provider means prioritizing not cost but security, accessibility, and scalability.

For example, at Corodata, we use highly secure facilities using the latest technology, including climate-controlled vaults, to give businesses the peace of mind needed when storing their most sensitive data with us.

5. Develop a Disaster Recovery Plan

Disaster recovery plans are enacted when you experience a substantial disaster because it’s the plan outlining the steps your team will take if there’s an IT incident. Above all, the goal of this plan is to identify, address, and mitigate the impact of an incident.

Steps involved in creating your disaster recovery plan include:

  • Assigning responsibilities among your team.
  • Performing a risk assessment and a business impact analysis.
  • Defining your recovery procedures.
  • Creating a testing and training schedule.

Like all good plans, a disaster recovery plan requires regular reviews and updates. Even if you never have to use it, ensuring it’s updated guarantees that you have a reliable “Break Glass” mechanism if the worst happens.

6. Test and Update the IT Resilience Plan Frequently

All good plans only work when they are ready to go at a moment’s notice. The problem many businesses have is they create a plan, file it away, and then expect everything to go according to plan when it’s needed. This isn’t a viable strategy for a modern business.

Your IT resilience plan must evolve alongside your business. Likewise, with constant threats and challenges arising, the plan you made one year ago will not be as effective today as it was then. Frequent testing and training ensures that your plan is ready to be enacted and everyone is on the same page.

7. Incorporate New Security Technologies

Cybersecurity is a constant arms race between businesses and cybercriminals. Threats evolve rapidly, meaning that your systems must be equipped with the latest security measures if they’re going to remain resilient.

Take the time to stay updated on brand-new technologies and threats. Moreover, ensure you invest in your business’s security to protect against emerging threats. This is something both senior management and your IT team must stay on top of.

Case Study: The CrowdStrike/Microsoft Incident

Businesses were cruelly reminded of their lack of resiliency recently when a global IT outage was triggered by a faulty update from CrowdStrike. The issues were further compounded by Microsoft Azure, resulting in airlines, banks, retailers, hospitals, and more going down with the Blue Screens of Death (BSOD) on Windows devices.

In CrowdStrike’s case, they admitted that the issue was a software malfunction, demonstrating that poor update management can be just as dangerous as a cyberattack. It shows that phased update deployment, regular testing, and avoiding single points of failure are crucial for avoiding incidents out of your control.

At Corodata, we took several key steps in responding to these incidents. We informed our clients of the information we had available at the earliest opportunity. Furthermore, we ensured that our offsite storage services became instantly accessible to facilitate businesses in recovering their systems.

It sounds simple, but prompt action and enacting our resiliency strategies empowered our clients to stay protected and return to normal operations as soon as possible.

Use Offsite Storage Solutions for Your IT Resilience Plan

IT resilience plans require managing and coordinating multiple moving parts. One such part is offsite storage, which is the failsafe that protects your businesses from harm if you lose access to your primary systems.

With offsite media storage services, Corodata is California’s leading records management and storage company, protecting thousands of the Golden State’s leading companies.

Corodata is the #1 company in California

Discover how we can support your IT resilience plan by contacting our team today
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