How can organizations bridge the gap between DR and cybersecurity?

Breaking down the silos between disaster recovery (DR) and cybersecurity has become increasingly important to ensure maximum business resiliency against outages, data breaches, and ransomware attacks. Yet, many organizations still operate these functions separately, leading to slower response times, budgeting challenges, duplicated resource allocations, and an overall weaker security and business continuity posture.

Why must DR and cybersecurity teams collaborate?

Encouraging collaboration between your disaster recovery and cybersecurity teams can offer several benefits for your company, as both teams deal with risks, incidents, and the overall resilience of the organization’s technology infrastructure.

There are five significant reasons to ensure your DR and cybersecurity teams are tightly integrated and routinely collaborating:

• Streamlined planning and strategy: Integrating the teams can help align their strategies, policies, and procedures, resulting in a more cohesive and robust approach to risk management. This can also lead to more efficient use of resources and better overall organizational resilience.
• Improved communication and collaboration: Integration enables smoother communication and collaboration between the two teams. This can help ensure a more efficient response to incidents and promote a better understanding of the overall risk landscape.
• Enhanced incident response: By working together, the teams can develop comprehensive incident response plans that address both cybersecurity threats and other disaster scenarios. This can lead to a faster, more effective response to incidents and minimize downtime.
• Cost savings and resource optimization: By combining the efforts of the disaster recovery and cybersecurity teams, companies may be able to reduce costs through shared resources and infrastructure. This can also help minimize redundancies and optimize the use of available resources.
• Improved risk assessment and management: The combined expertise of both teams allows for a more comprehensive understanding of the risks facing the organization. This can lead to more accurate risk assessments, better prioritization of resources, and ultimately, a stronger defense against potential threats.

How to break down the silos

To effectively break down those silos, organizations must take a holistic approach to their IT security and business continuity strategy.

This starts with establishing clear roles and responsibilities for each team and ensuring that there is communication between them. Regular meetings between groups are key to building trust.

With roles clearly defined and communication lines open, next the teams must create cohesive processes and procedures that encompass both DR and cybersecurity functions. This starts with alignment on the business continuity plan and extends to include regular incident response drills or tabletop exercises that simulate real-world scenarios. Through drills, both teams know exactly what steps are needed in the incident response process and how to best work together for fast and effective response with minimal or no disruption to the business.

Next, it is important to make sure that both teams have access to the same resources such as threat intelligence data and tools for monitoring security and DR events. Having unified access will allow both teams to quickly respond to any potential threats or incidents. It also creates an opportunity to reduce spend on potentially duplicative technology and tools.

Taking shared visibility a step further, organizations should invest in technologies that bridge the gap between DR and cybersecurity operations by providing visibility into both areas from a unified dashboard. This type of visibility allows teams to quickly identify any gaps in their security or resiliency posture and remediate them before attackers have a chance to exploit them.

By having integrated tools such as security automation platforms, security incident & event management (SIEM), endpoint detection & response (EDR), data loss prevention (DLP), organizations can dramatically reduce the time it takes for them to detect anomalies or malicious activity on their network as well as speed up incident response times when needed.

Increasing resiliency through team alignment

The time to break down these IT team silos is now. It will improve overall business resilience and help reduce operational costs associated with maintaining separate systems or procedures for different, yet similar functions. Ultimately, by taking a holistic approach, organizations greatly reduce their risk of attack while improving their overall reaction time when responding to incidents or disasters.

Successfully integrating your DR and cybersecurity teams will also increase your stakeholder’s, including your customers, partners, and investors, confidence in your cyber and operational maturity. This can positively impact your professional reputation and will certainly contribute to your long-term success.

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