Disaster Recovery Mastery: Key Strategies for Uninterrupted Business Success
Disaster Recovery: Your Business’s Lifeline
In the fast-paced world of business, disaster recovery, access rights, and core security principles often take a backseat. However, these elements are vital for safeguarding our data and systems, ensuring business continuity in the face of adversity. From IT departments to cybersecurity teams, organizations must proactively plan and prepare for worst-case scenarios. One such measure is Disaster Recovery, a strategy that maintains system functionality during disasters by keeping data readily available at an alternate location.
Understanding Disaster Recovery
Regardless of the cause of disruption or system failure, numerous steps are taken to ensure business continuity. Disaster recovery refers to the backup or copy systems activated when an organization faces adverse scenarios. In today’s technology-driven world, these systems are typically provided through Cloud Servers or Dedicated Servers. For critically important data, organizations may also use systems located at different physical locations within the country.
Six Key Areas for System Security Assessment
Disaster recovery, access rights, and appropriate principles are sometimes overlooked. To simplify and remember, we can divide the stages of assessing a system’s security into six key sections:
- Disaster Recovery
- Patches
- Ports
- Protection
- Policies
- Physical Access
System Patches
Patching a system is the most fundamental part of security. When assessing a system’s security, check if there’s a procedure to manage the routine processing of all patches. A written policy is essential, but during a security audit, ensure that these policies are followed, which is crucial in today’s technology landscape.
Operating system and application vendors occasionally discover security flaws in their products and release patches to fix these issues. Unfortunately, some organizations may not apply these patches for 30 days or longer after release. In some cases, due to cumbersome structures and application incompatibilities, these patches may not be implemented for months.
Ports
All communication occurs through a port (TCP/UDP), and this includes many virus attacks. Typically, a virus attack will exploit an unused port to access your system. Remember that ports between 1 and 1024 are assigned and used for well-known protocols. Closing these ports significantly reduces your vulnerability to specific attacks that operate on certain port numbers.
Some system administrators may not create a policy to close unused ports, believing that a firewall blocking certain traffic eliminates the need to block that port on individual machines. However, this approach provides only perimeter security, not layered security. Closing ports on individual machines will also increase the efficiency of the firewall.
As a rule, any port you do not need should be closed, and communication permission should not be granted on that port. A port is usually associated with a service. For example, an FTP service is typically associated with ports 21 and 20. To close a port on a single machine, you need to shut down the service using that port, meaning that unused services on servers and separate workstations should be shut down.
Protection
The next step is to ensure the use of all reasonable protective software and devices. At a minimum, this means having a firewall between your network and the outside world. More advanced firewalls are preferred over stateful packet inspection firewalls. When auditing a system, know not only whether the system has a firewall but also what type of firewall it has.
Consider using an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) on your systems or a web server. IDSs are the only way to know about ongoing attacks, and free, open-source IDSs are available. Firewalls and IDS provide basic security to the perimeter of your network, but you also need virus scanning. Every machine, including servers, should have a regularly updated virus scanner. It would be wise to consider spyware prevention software on all your systems to prevent users on your network from accidentally running spyware.
A proxy server is also a good idea. Not only does it mask your internal IP addresses, but most proxy servers also allow you to discover the websites users visit and set filters for specific sites. Many security experts consider a proxy server as important as a firewall.
In addition to protecting your network, you should also protect data transmitted from outside your network. All external connections should be made through a VPN. Encrypting data prevents hackers from capturing data through a packet sniffer. For more secure locations, you may want all internal transfers to be encrypted as well.
In short, when evaluating the protection of a network, check whether the following items are present, properly configured, and operational:
- Firewall
- Antivirus protection
- Spyware protection
- IDS/IPS
- Proxy server or NAT
- VPN
Remember that most networks meet the first two items. Any network without a firewall or antivirus software is so non-standard that the audit should probably stop at this point. In fact, it is unlikely that such an organization would even undergo a security audit. IDS and data encryption options are probably less common but should be considered for all systems.
Physical Access
In addition to protecting your network from unwanted digital access, ensuring adequate physical security is crucial. Physical security measures are essential to prevent unauthorized access to your network infrastructure and data centers. This includes securing server rooms, using biometric access controls, and implementing surveillance systems to monitor physical access points. For more information on physical security, refer to ASIS International.
