IT Support in Houston: Integrating Cybersecurity into Your DR Plan

Cybersecurity and disaster recovery are the two undeniably crucial IT support services in Houston that any business should prioritize. Cybersecurity deals with the protection of your IT assets, including data from threats such as data loss. Disaster recovery, on the other hand, has to do with business continuity after a disaster. These two may have different approaches, but they both work to achieve the same objective, which is keeping your business up and running at all times.

Both disaster recovery and cybersecurity lessen the effects of disasters. DR stresses more on recovery, while cybersecurity stresses on prevention of the unplanned incidences. The two processes combined work to ensure there is business continuity and minimal downtime. This means that they are both essential to the survival of any business and they should never be separated.

Any threat, be it a natural disaster, a classic virus, or network attack, can cause havoc in an organization. Thus, it calls for the need to integrate cybersecurity into your DR strategy. Consider the following IT support tips in Houston for achieving the same:

Prioritize What You Want to Secure

Businesses should ensure that all aspects of security are covered. Once you identify what needs protection, you will align your DR plan to fit accordingly. For example, a ransomware attack can have all your critical files encrypted. It is important to have backups in an off-site location and even limit access to the mission-critical backups.

Prepare for Specific Threats

Plan your backup strategies with select threats in mind. For instance, when protecting against ransomware, invest in a data recovery plan in Houston that will enable you to backup and recover individual files because ransomware encrypts individual files. This means that in recovery, you only need to restore the affected files and not the entire system. You may not have enough time to go through the entire system.

Set Goals on Your Recovery Needs

As you plan on how to recover from security disasters, you should determine the vulnerability of your systems to certain threats. For instance, recovery from a Trojan involves containment, eradication as you work to restore the server. With a DDoS attack, you have to identify the source and neutralize the threat to stabilize performance. Whatever step you take or amount of data that you can afford to lose depends on the system and the type of threat.

Some IT support providers in Houston recommend planning cybersecurity and DR independently. Whichever approach you take is fine as long as you realize their correlation and effect on your business continuity. Contact us at ICS to learn more about cybersecurity and DR in relation to business continuity.

Jason Simons

ICS is a Texas-based 40-year-old technology company specializing in Managed IT, VoIP, Video Conferencing and Video Surveillance solutions for US and International businesses. ICS has over 4000 regional installations and specializes in multi-site businesses between 25 and 2500 employees. ICS’s customers enjoy the experience of ICS’s Total Care program which provides clients flat fee services with obsolescence and growth protection. Whether a customer elects to deploy their IT, Video Conferencing or VoIP in the cloud or on the customer’s premise, ICS can provide a full turn-key solution for our clients under one flat monthly fee.