In today's world, data is king, but it's also a source of risk. Companies face a constant barrage of threats that can lead to devastating data loss. These include everything from simple hardware and software failures to natural disasters and major cyber attacks. The consequences of data loss can be severe, impacting revenue, operations, reputation, and legal compliance, so planning for these worst-case scenarios is an important part of an IT team’s playbook.
ℹ️Info
The staggering cost of data loss
The financial fallout from data loss can extend far beyond the immediate costs of data recovery and system restoration.
Revenue loss from downtime. Downtime translates directly into lost business opportunities impacting revenue streams and potentially leading to customer churn as clients seek out more reliable alternatives.
High cost of recovery efforts. The task of recovering data and restoring systems is expensive and burdensome, and can include overtime pay for dedicated IT personnel, additional infrastructure to cover business needs, and the procurement of third-party expertise to navigate the complexities of data recovery.
Reputational damage. Data loss and the ensuing loss of customer trust can inflict severe damage upon an organization's reputation, damage that can lead to long-term financial consequences as clients and partners become wary of associating with a compromised organization.
Regulatory penalties. Organizations that fail to comply with strict data protection regulations may face severe consequences, including substantial fines and legal proceedings. These can lead to financial burdens and lengthy legal battles that deplete resources and damage the organization's reputation with both public and regulatory bodies.
Real-world examples of data loss disasters, such as the infamous DarkSide ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline in 2021, and Code Spaces going out of business in 2018, serve as stark reminders of the devastating widespread damage that can occur when data protection measures fail. And it’s not just large enterprises that feel the pain, this Reddit thread from r/sysadmin shares data loss stories from businesses of all shapes and sizes.
How data loss impacts IT and security teams
During these events, IT and security teams take center stage, managing investigation, recovery, communication, and more. In major data loss situations, these teams work on restoring internal operations while also working with legal and customer-facing teams to outline the loss specifics.
It's extremely important that this is communicated externally in a timely manner, to ensure customer trust and transparency are maintained. Even smaller internal data loss scenarios, like the loss of an employee’s Excel data from hardware failure, impact the productivity of an IT team and require them to deprioritize other projects and improvements in order to focus on recovery.
Imagine this:
Your organization’s security engineer receives an alert that a couple of employees have downloaded malware, taking down their corporate devices.
While investigating the source, the security engineer loops in their helpdesk team to provide these employees with fresh machines so they can continue working. While the helpdesk technician chats with the employees, the tech realizes the malicious file was shared by the same individual to each impacted employee via their internal company file share program. An IT engineer joins the investigation to review the data, only to discover the infected file has been added to multiple shared drives and must be cleaned up.
Suddenly a scenario where an employee has either maliciously or accidentally spread malware involves multiple IT and security team members, taking them away from supporting the business elsewhere.
As we know, the best defense is a good offense, and while having solid, proactive security protocols in place is vital to organizations to prevent data loss, planning and investing in these inherently reactive scenarios is just as important. Data backups allow IT and security teams to increase efficiency and see the organization up and running again. Data backups empower IT and security teams to resolve issues with speed, enabling the organization to get back up and running as soon as possible. (pun intended)
How automation and orchestration can help
Implementing a robust disaster recovery strategy, including data backups, is essential for IT teams to safeguard their organization’s information, minimize downtime, and ensure compliance with data protection regulations.
Orchestration and automation platforms can play a key role in streamlining and optimizing these processes, freeing up much needed time for IT teams during these instances, as well as minimizing the business impact.
At its core, a backup is a copy of data stored separately from the original, providing a safety net against data loss or corruption. If data is lost or corrupted, the backup can be used to restore it to its original state, ensuring business continuity and minimizing operational impact.
The frequency of backups depends on several factors, including the criticality of the data, the organization's risk tolerance, and the available resources. For mission-critical data, backups should be performed more frequently to minimize the potential for data loss. In contrast, smaller team-specific applications or resources may be backed up less frequently to save on the cost of storing those backups. Workflow orchestration and automation platforms like Tines can remove the need for manual work to schedule and execute backups over various infrastructure at the optimal frequency.
These backups flow into an organization’s overall disaster recovery plan. Beyond automating backups, platforms like Tines can automate the execution of a disaster recovery plan such as the creation of cloud infrastructure to restore the backups and managing communications to teams waiting on updates for system uptime, overall minimizing downtime and ensuring a rapid and coordinated response to data loss incidents.
Backups and disaster recovery plans are essential components of a robust data protection strategy for enterprise organizations. By implementing a comprehensive disaster recovery strategy and leveraging orchestration and automation platforms, organizations can ensure that their data is safe, their operations can continue uninterrupted in the event of a disaster, and their compliance with data protection regulations is maintained.
Examples from the Tines library
The Tines library has a wealth of pre-built workflows (sometimes called stories by Tines users), which connect to over 400 other security and IT tools. Here are two of my personal favorites that cover backups.
AWS snapshot restoration
Here at Tines, restoring to backup as soon as possible is a critical approach when addressing data loss.
Imagine the earlier mentioned scenario where your internal application was infected with malware; restoring the application infrastructure to a previous snapshot can easily be simplified with automation, limiting application downtime and data loss.
Here, we have a story that automates using AWS snapshots to rollback EC2 instances, allowing our Tines users to quickly utilize their backups!
Roll back AWS EC2 instances to previous snapshots using tags
Roll back EC2 instances to a previous snapshot. Select instances to restore using assigned tags.
Tools
Created by
Backing up Tines stories
We also know how important it is to back up our own IT applications and infrastructure - even our Tines tenant stories. In fact, we have a story that takes backups of our stories just in case they're accidentally (or maliciously) deleted from our internal tenant.
Having these stories backed up allows us to quickly recover our internal Tines processes and automation if they're lost, making sure we minimize any downtime affecting our employees, impacting compliance and ultimately, our customers.
Backup Tines Stories to GitLab and notify Slack
Export Tines Stories to GitLab. Individual stories can be backed up by using their Story ID, or the argument `all` for Story ID will backup all stories that can be accessed. Backups are stored in nested folders based on their team and folder name in Tines. Message into Slack when the backup is complete to give further visibility.
Created by
