As rapid shifts give way to more consistent structures around the scope and scale of remote work, business owners face a new challenge: Security.
With staff now using a combination of company-provided and personal devices to access corporate networks and leverage business assets — and with many employees likely working from home for the foreseeable future — the corporate attack surface has expanded exponentially. A recent survey found that 91% of businesses are reporting an uptick in cyberattacks since the pandemic began.
While proactive, protective posture can help detect and deflect some of these attacks, no defense is perfect. As a result, it is critical for companies to develop backup and disaster recovery (BDR) strategies that both recognize the new realities and help reduce the risks associated with remote work.
By the Numbers
After a significant natural disaster or major data breach, roughly 40-60% of small businesses close permanently. Lack of planning is part of the problem. Many companies struggle with adapting BDR strategies to suit remote staffing frameworks — and 20% have no BDR plan at all.
Remote workers also introduce added risk, as 45% of employees admit to reusing passwords across multiple business and personal accounts. Fifty percent say they don’t password protect home networks, even when those networks are used to access business data and services.
For business managers and owners, these numbers highlight a growing need for robust BDR policies that both address current requirements and can scale up to meet emerging demands.
Boosting BDR
So how do business owners boost BDR in practice?
No matter the end goal, the starting point should be the same: Complete a frank assessment of your current BDR plans and outcomes. Consider recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs). While pre-pandemic targets were largely focused on in-situ datacenter DR and backups, the distributed nature of work-from-home deployment requires a reassessment of how long recovery needs to take and where it needs to happen first.
If RTOs and RPOs are COVID current, the next step is to evaluate the ability of existing infrastructure to meet these expectations. Do your BDR services and solutions have the capacity to handle recovery objectives both in-office and at a distance? Here, a combination of on-site and cloud-capable solutions could help bridge the gap.
Next, companies must consider where their data is collected and how workers connect to this information on-demand. Consider the case of single-source data stored on local stacks; if a natural disaster or cyberattack makes this information inaccessible, the impact to both employee performance and business revenue could be substantial. Corporate networks come with the same concern. If standard connections fail, how can remote staff keep working?
Solving these issues starts with solid, multi-site BDR that backs up your data every few minutes combined with secondary connection services — such as VPNs that can be accessed via smartphone hotspots — to ensure that even the unexpected won’t derail business operations for long.
Bottom line? Remote work is now the norm, not the exception. To drive ROI and reduce operational risk in this new reality, robust BDR is a requirement. For more information, check out the accompanying resource below.
Infographic Created By MXOtech
