Do you need a business continuity plan for cybersecurity? Yes, you do. An employee can download malware to your network, and another can inadvertently leak your customer information. In an increasingly digital and interconnected world, numerous cybersecurity threats exist, and your company can be the next victim.
No matter your size, activity and industry, a business continuity plan (besides an IT audit) are critical components of a comprehensive enterprise risk management framework, and managing risks is essential to doing business.
Business Continuity Plan: What Is It?
A business continuity plan is a document that discusses in great detail what your company plans to do to ensure your business continues to run as usual even if a disruptive incident takes place.
Good business practice requires a continuity plan for every critical business activity. If your company relies heavily on information technology (IT) to operate, a strategy geared toward responding to cybersecurity incidents is vital to ensuring continuity.
A BCP is not the same as a disaster recovery plan or an incident response plan.
- Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP): A DRP outlines what your company plans to do to recover your data, data infrastructure, communication capabilities, and connectivity after an incident.
- Incident Response Plan (IRP): An IRP provides a detailed outline of how your company will respond to a cybersecurity incident.
- Business Continuity Plan: The business continuity plan includes the incident response and disaster recovery plans. Its primary purpose, however, is to outline the steps the company must take to keep its processes running and functions operating despite the occurrence of a cybersecurity incident.
Cybersecurity Threats
A business continuity plan identifies and plans for specific cybersecurity threats. The following are the top threats that can lead to a data breach or IT systems damage:
- Outdated security software
- Lack of or weak encryption
- Improper authorization configuration
- Mobile malware
- Technology with weak or inadequate security
- Corporate data on personal devices
- Social media attacks
- Social engineering
- Third-party entry
Can You Afford It?
Is business continuity planning expensive? It depends on your strategy. Thus, it pays to confer with a business advisory firm, particularly one with risk management advisory experience in cybersecurity and information technology.
Outsourcing can be an economical option, as paying outsourced teams will cost you less than building a team in-house. Your costs go down even more when you go offshore, and it’s entirely possible to establish a functional IT team for only 35% of what an in-house team costs.
BCP Outsourcing Models
You may outsource business continuity planning to a managed services provider. You may also outsource individual IT-enabled processes like tech support, data security, or network operations monitoring and management. Whichever option you choose, you can ensure operational continuity when a cybersecurity incident arises.
In the first option, your company can continue to operate because the managed services provider will take care of everything for you. They’ll plan and execute, so you won’t have to do anything except follow their lead.
In the second option, your chosen provider’s continuity plans for the data and information it processes and handles will shield you as well. Your outsourcing partner will ensure the continuity of the processes you’ve outsourced with them.
Why You Need a Business Continuity Plan
If you think investing in a cybersecurity business continuity plan is expensive, wait until something happens, and you’re caught without a plan in place.
IBM reports a data breach has a global average cost of $4.45 million in 2023. That’s how much you stand to lose, on average, without a business continuity plan. If history is any indication, you can expect this amount to increase over time, as this figure is 15% higher than what it was three years ago.
Without a business continuity plan, you could suffer these losses or incur these costs:
1. Cost of Resolution
Without a plan, responding to incidents can be a lot more expensive. A company will need to find experts who can work urgently to resolve the problem, and the urgency will jack up the price.
2. Revenue Loss
How much revenue do you make every day? You automatically register a loss equivalent to your daily income every day you cannot operate because of a cybersecurity emergency. To put this in context, consider Amazon, which makes around $1.29 billion daily. It stands to lose that amount every day it stops operating because of a cybersecurity incident.
Mid-sized companies typically make at least $50 million, according to Gartner. That’s an average daily revenue (and loss, in case of grave operational disruptions) of nearly $137,000.
The revenue loss estimates above do not even include future losses from customers permanently turned off by the incident.
3. Reputational Damage
A brand can take a severe hit from a cybersecurity incident, especially if the company is a custodian of sensitive customer data.
Once a company’s reputation is damaged, it must spend money on branding and reputation repair. A tarnished image also indirectly causes revenue losses.
4. Fines and Penalties
Companies pay steep fines for data breaches. Companies also pay penalties for non-compliance and regulatory violations.
For instance, if you don’t report a data leak when the law says you should, you could be fined and your executives sent to jail. There can also be fines and penalties when your company’s negligence is material to the incident.
5. Loss of Productivity
Cybersecurity incidents can lead to loss of productivity as employees lose time not doing anything or doing something else. If your company cannot serve customers, your front-end employees will have nothing to do. If your systems are frozen and your data unavailable, your back-end employees may have to stop working, too.
Even if a company reassigns employees to other tasks, these replacement tasks may not bring in significant or equivalent returns. The company’s employees may also have to spend time replicating lost datasets.
Business Continuity Planning Is Crucial
A cybersecurity business continuity plan is a document that describes the steps a company will take to ensure it can continue operating even during a data breach, leak, or any other cybersecurity incident. It can protect you from financial, productivity and reputational losses.
Outsourcing is one of the more cost-effective business continuity strategies you can use. Enterprises that generate revenue from IT-enabled processes, such as software as a service (SaaS) companies, can outsource IT processes to ensure continuity even in a cybersecurity crisis.
Likewise, businesses that handle and process personally identifiable information – for example, banks, insurance companies, hospitals, universities, and even second citizenship consultants – must institute measures to safeguard the privacy of their clients’ data.