The importance of BCDR: Lessons from the recent CrowdStrike outage
A number of weeks ago, my team and I hosted a client event to discuss Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) strategies in the face of the ever-evolving threat landscape. Little did we know that very shortly afterwards, the world would be dealing with a serious disruption caused by the CrowdStrike outage.
A faulty software update resulted in a massive overnight outage that affected Windows computers around the world. This incident disrupted critical systems across organisations that affected business services and critical infrastructure including airports, train stations, banks, broadcasters and the healthcare. It hammered home many of the points our clients discussed with us and served as a stark reminder of the importance of having a robust BCDR plan in place.
For many organisations, traditional BCDR approaches and aligned strategies are challenged to meet business continuity needs, particularly the constantly evolving cyber and ransomware threat. For critical business systems that support critical business processes a renewed approach is needed. BearingPoint champion an air-gapped BCDR recovery environment that can support critical business processes in the event of a business continuity incident.
The recovery environment built on zero trust principles should include everything required to operate critical business processes providing identities, collaboration and communications, virtual desktops and of course the critical business applications. The environment should also be supported by robust business services, data backup and synchronisation policies to allow data recovery into the recovery environment. The recovery environment should be managed with automaton to ensure security, agility and minimise drift from the primary environment.
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In conclusion, the recent CrowdStrike outage underscores the importance of BCDR and aligned processes. It serves as a reminder that organisations must be prepared for all eventualities.
Has your organisation evaluated your BCDR strategies for its effectiveness against the modern threat landscape recently? If not, we’d recommend you do this.
If you need any help or want to learn more, please reach out directly. #BearingPointIreland #BearingPoint