Cloud-based computing and the whole notion of SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) is becoming the most critical expertise for this era. Due to this,business continuity experts should be seeking what this development means for them and its potential impact.
According to a survey, 73% of organizations fall victim to natural disasters and human-made disasters, including malicious hacking and malware. This negatively impacts business operations. It isn’t just enough to back up your data with traditional software packages; you need the cloud.
EC-Council Disaster Recovery Professional (EDRP) certification certifies IT professionals, cybersecurity experts, BC/DR experts, CISOs, IT directors, and other cybersecurity enthusiasts in the field of business continuity and disaster recovery. Having an EDRP certification is a logical ‘next step’ for those who want to further their career in the field of business continuity and disaster recovery.
What exactly is the cloud?
The cloud means different things for different occasions. Cloud computing is a word used to generally define data centers accessible to several people via the internet, delivered on-demand basis to users. Put simply;cloud computing describes the process of storing and retrieving programs and data through the internet rather than using your system’s hard drive. The cloud is a metaphoric description of the internet.
Different forms of cloud computing services exist, including infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS). Internet users can benefit a lot from using cloud-based services. These benefits include reduced spending on IT and IT infrastructure, speedy implementation, flexible pricing, and elevated scalability.
What are business continuity planning and disaster recovery?
Disaster recovery and business continuity planning are procedures that assist organizations in preparing for natural and human-made disasters or incidents. These incidents could be a hurricane, tornado, or merely a power outage. The role of an EDRP in this scenario can range from supervising the business continuity and disaster recovery plan to offering input and backing, to executing the plan during an incident or emergency.
While no degree of preparation can avert an incident, however, when a disaster, capable of completely halting the complete business operations occurs, having a disaster recovery program and a business continuity plan can mitigate the attack and keep the business running again.
What is the difference between disaster recovery & business continuity?
Although disaster recovery programs and business continuity plans appear similar, they are not the same thing. Disaster recovery programs are procedures that enable an organization to get all its critical IT infrastructure and business operations running after a disruptive event.
The event may be as catastrophic as an earthquake, Hurricane Katrina, terrorist attacks, or something as minute as a computer virus, supply chain partner problems, or power outage. Most business executives often tend to overlook their cybersecurity disaster recovery programs since disasters are seemingly improbable.
On the other hand, a business continuity plan is a more inclusive process that ensures that the entire organization is fully functioning following a catastrophic event. The aim is to ensure that the organization continues to make money, regardless of the size of the incident. This ensures that HR can easily access vital information about their works, so that customer service representatives can access their CRM applications, and the marketing department can gain authentication to their stored graphics.
While these two concepts are not the same, they are often used interchangeably. The label BC/DR is the umbrella term for these concepts due to their shared considerations. To learn more about BC/DR, visit our webpage on EDRP courses.
Who is responsible for the business continuity plan?
Disaster recovery professionals (DRP) are often responsible for the creation and sustenance of a business continuity plan. They work directly with significant business units to know their business procedures, detect, and assess their risks, and offer technologies or software that will assist in managing and mitigating these potential risks.
Whether your company wants to take up cloud-based disaster recovery programs or cloud-based business continuity solutions, it is more logical to collaborate with business continuity and disaster recovery service provider. A DRP has the needed knowledge to perform a correct business impact analysis, vulnerability assessments, formulate policies, and plans that are most suitable for the organization.
How do cloud-based systems support business continuity?
Since cloud computing services profoundly depend on hardware virtualization tools, it helps organizations to speedily back up their sensitive information and data, operating systems, and applications to the cloud. With quicker uploads and downloads of significant computing features, comes quicker recovery times and business continuity for the organization.
1. Readily Accessible
When it comes to business continuity planning, most organizations perceive SaaS as the available option. Most organizations can benefit from cloud-based business continuity programs, even in remote locations. Members of your IT department can select the suitable services that meet their unique business demands with a wide variety of services that cloud computing offers.
2. Robust Response
When an incident occurs or in an emergency, it is easy to restore and recover your data from the cloud. This ensures business continuity due to the robust response from your cloud computing services. Likewise, traditional business continuity and disaster recovery plans can be burdensome. With cloud computing service, you can ask your service provider to replicate your file to a new location. An EDRP knows to evaluate the specifications of the SaaS provider to familiarize themselves with and get comfortable with the conveniences delivered.
3. Reduced Costs
Traditional BC/DC solutions are extremely expensive to manage. They usually involve purchasing and sustaining a comprehensive set of hardware that harmonizes or reflects the critical systems of a business, such as adequate storage to accommodate a broad duplicate of the entire organization’s business data.
However, cloud-based business continuity plans or strategies are affordable, lucrative, and economical for all business sizes. Business continuity planning that is cloud-based eliminates the requirement for costly remote production centers. Similarly, organizations are given the choice of tailoring their business continuity plan, since they can subscribe solely to necessary services. Companies can then decide to modify their subscription plans as they expand their business operations.
CLOUD AND DISASTER RECOVERY: THE 5 W’S
How can potential risks be transferred to cloud providers?
When you use the services of unauthorized cloud providers, it could compromise your network or devices through data exfiltration and malware infections, since the enterprise cannot secure resources with which it is not conversant. Using unlicensed cloud providers might also compromise your network’s visibility and administration of business data and networks.
One of the major recognized potential risks for cloud computing, which affects not just the organization but also the cloud providers, includes compliance and jurisdictional risks, lack of data security and privacy, availability risks, unauthorized access.
1. Compliance And Jurisdictional Risks
Some industries are highly regulated, including banking, auditing, healthcare, and government organizations. Several business information security regulations and compliance are needed to safeguard specific data. Cloud providers are bound by these regulations and required to not only secure the data of their consumers but also to know how the data is defended, who has authorized access, and the location of the data. A company without suitable legal protections, suffer the consequences when there is a breach at the cloud.
2. Lack Of Data Security and Privacy
In a way, you place the entirety of your business in the hands of the cloud providers. You supply them with access to sensitive information, including mailing lists, payment data, user ID, and so on. Most people are unaware of who their cloud providers are, their integrity, the data access they have, and the type of security solution being used. Can you vouch for the reputation of your client?
3. Availability Risks
There is no complete uptime guarantee from any provider. When you depend on your cloud providers for essential business operations, then you entrust your business sustainability to your ISP and cloud providers. When you suffer a downtime, your cloud provider also suffers. Your cloud providers can also suffer downtime from DDoS and DoS attacks, SQL injection attacks, or even bad weather. Availability risks are less severe but still detrimental.
4. Unauthorized Access
Internal threats and external threats aggregate cloud computing risks. When you outsource your business tasks to other cloud vendors, not only should you be worried about your staff but also the staff of your vendors. Government intrusion risks also intensify when you use the services of cloud providers.
Why do you need disaster recovery certification courses?
From Hurricane Katrina to the WannaCry debacle and currently, to the COVID-19 pandemic, the business landscape has been battered by one form of disaster or the other. The frightening aspect of all this is that the rate of recurrence is growing aggressively in the past few years, owing to the mounting volumes of cyberattacks.
It is even more amazing when statistics demonstrate that, at most, 2 out of every 5 business lacks a solid disaster recovery and business continuity plan. Even out of those that do have this, only a handful test the plan regularly for flaws and relevance. This is what disaster recovery certification courses are created for.
EC-Council Disaster Recovery Professional (EDRP) certification is designed to educate and validate an applicant’s proficiency to strategize, plan, execute, and sustain viable business continuity and disaster recovery plan. Regardless of the size of your organization, you need an EDRP to stay relevant in this age. This dearth can be remedied by BC/DR experts who do not only recognize the significance of cloud services as a business continuity and disaster recovery plan but are also proficient to guarantee that your business incurs minimal costs when an incident occurs.
Source: eccouncil.org
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