Quick Intelligence Blog

When it comes to running your business, you know that you need to be prepared. Just like we all know what to do in the event of a fire because we practice our escape plan, it is important for your business to plan and prepare for a ransomware attack.

When it comes to breach readiness, it is important that you know how your business will respond in the event of a ransomware attack. While we all hope we don’t suffer a ransomware attack, being prepared for the worst can help you recover quickly and lessen some of the devastating effects. One of the best ways to prepare is to prioritize your key business processes.

Prioritizing which business process are most important is key to the recovery process. For instance, what happens if the finance department is hit by ransomware before completing the quarterly close? If ransomware impacts the customer service team in a way that impacts their ability to field customer inquiries, will this devastate your business? These are questions that need to be asked, and businesses processes like these need to be ranked in order of most important to least important.

This ranking of business process will help determine what vulnerabilities are addressed first by the organization. It will also determine what business process need to be put back online in the event of a ransomware attack.

Once you have the rankings, you can use this to develop your patch management strategy. With the number of vulnerabilities out there, it is impossible to patch every vulnerability immediately. This is where ranking your business priorities come into play. By prioritizing patching systems based on business outcomes it enables security teams to address ransomware in a business context. Security teams need to work with their business leaders to determine the outcomes and processes that will need to be most protected, and therefore patched first.

This ranking of priorities also works well when it comes to testing your back up restoration process. If your business is like most businesses, you don’t think about restoring from your backups until you need to. Unfortunately, finding out after a ransomware attack has occurred that you can’t restore your data from the backups. While it can be time consuming and expensive to test restoring all your company data, prioritize which systems need to be restored first, and prioritize testing the restore capabilities of your most mission-critical data.

Being prepared for a ransomware attack before it happens is key to being able to recover quickly with little business impact. Part of that is knowing which business processes take priority when it comes to patching vulnerabilities and restoring from backups. To help you build your breach readiness plan, contact QuickProtect and ask about Breach Readiness as a Service.