COMMENT
Building that cloud continuity
plan you will need
Dan Sloshberg at Mimecast explains why a continuity plan including
email is essential when moving to the cloud.
In today’s digital world, 88% of
organisations rate email availability as
critical to their organisation, with more
than half rating it as mission critical.
Despite this, many organisations
still struggle to quickly connect the
dots between valuable attack data
from their security investments. One
successful email attack could shut-
down an entire company, and hackers
know it. to keep an increasing number of
messages and attachments in their
archive. Remembering that it is their
data, responsibility ultimately sits with
them to safeguard it. This is especially
important with the upcoming General
Data Protection Regulation, which
will fine businesses 4% of annual
worldwide turnover or 20 million Euros
if data breaches are not reported
within 72 hours.
When moving to the cloud,
organisations must think about their
continuity plan. If things can go wrong,
at some point they probably will go
wrong. Whether it us due to an update
that did not go to plan, environmental
issues or connectivity problems, or even
an attacker trying to take down the
network, the potential for something to
go wrong is significant. Business continuity
Businesses must ask themselves what
their cyber resilience strategy is when
a critical cloud service goes offline.
Organisations need a continuity plan
to keep operating when their primary
provider becomes unavailable.
To stay ahead of security risks such
as this, organisations need to adopt
a cyber resilience strategy that spans
security, data protection and business
continuity.
Improved security
The first stage of this is for
organisations to implement layered
security, as email security solutions
that might have been adequate several
years ago often lack features to protect
against today’s modern attacks. This
next generation technology should
include cloud technology to ensure the
network is always up to date, ready
to protect against the latest and fast
moving threats.
As part of this, businesses must ensure
employees are trained appropriately.
91% of hacks begin with an email
attack and training staff will ensure
18
INTELLIGENTCIO
Dan Sloshberg is a Cyber Resilience
Expert at Mimecast.
To stay ahead of
risks organisations
need to adopt
a resilience
strategy that
spans security,
data protection,
business
continuity
that if something does reach an Inbox,
systems are not rendered useless.
Training employees on what to look out
for and what to do if they see an attack
is vital.
Data protection
As email moves to the cloud,
organisations must consider how
to appropriately protect their data,
especially as employees continue
To ensure businesses are ready when
the network goes down, organisations
should test their continuity solution
regularly. Without testing the solution,
organisations will learn the hard way
that data is not being entirely backed
up when they perform a restore.
Secondly, when it comes to planning,
businesses need a clear chain of
command, should disaster strike. If
the network goes down, businesses
need to know who to call immediately.
Performing testing once, simply is not
enough. Solutions need to be tested
depending on the tolerance of the
business.
By adopting a cyber resilience
strategy that spans security, data
protection and business continuity,
organisations can ensure email
availability in the cloud and
significantly reduce or even prevent
email downtime, data leakage and
financial loss after disaster strikes.
www.intelligentcio.com