Why ‘offline’ may be the key to resilience in the digital age

Over the past year, a wave of outages and cyber attacks have exposed the volatility of our connected digital world.

October’s AWS outage rippled across the entire digital ecosystem, bringing organisations to an abrupt operational standstill, while closely following the Vodafone outage, which saw thousands of businesses and consumers unable to get online.

Furthermore, we have seen monumental cyber breaches impacting thousands of organisations indirectly through complex supply chains, with the attack on Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) predicted to have affected 5,000 businesses and causing the UK to suffer its greatest cyber-related economic losses to date.

It’s safe to say these events won’t stop.

However, rather than just lambasting those responsible, businesses should take the opportunity to learn from these incidents, because the ability to navigate them quickly, with a clear plan, is key to true resilience.

Today’s complex digital ecosystem

Every organisation today runs on a complex web of digital services, cloud platforms and supply chain integrations. However, when one link fails, the ripple effects often cascade across customers, partners and critical operations.

In this environment, resilience isn’t just about avoiding disruptions; it’s about ensuring businesses can function through them.

Business leaders must accept that failures will happen, whether due to hostile cyber activity or outages beyond their control, and they must build continuity plans and recovery procedures that allow them to keep operating.

This was one of the key messages issued recently by the NCSC when it wrote to business leaders at FTSE 350 companies advising them to have business continuity plans written down on paper.

While the warning was undoubtedly in relation to the cyber incident at JLR, all organisations must understand that they too can be just as vulnerable.

Attacks and outages might not reach the same material or operational scale as the one impacting JLR, but businesses of all sizes are at risk, and the consequences will be relevant to their own operations.

All organisations should therefore take note of this warning and act on the advice from the NCSC.

Planning for failure

If an organisation suffers a cyber attack or system outage, access to key systems, including those that host recovery plans, may become unavailable. This means, as advised by the NCSC, having a physical, accessible copy of recovery plans is an essential part of resilience planning. A printed playbook can be the difference between success and failure, quick recovery or operational halt for several weeks or even months.

But a plan on paper is only as effective as the preparation behind it.

Organisations must also conduct incident response planning to understand their areas of exposure and work to mitigate them.

The first step is to map services across their entire digital estate and identify what is critical to their operations. This includes understanding how services to customers are delivered, what infrastructure they depend on to remain operational, how they communicate with customers, employees and stakeholders, and how the services they rely on from their partners underpin their own operations.

The next step is to work out how to continue operating if any of these key services failed.

For instance, if email was down, how would they communicate with employees and customers? If a cyber breach resulted in a network shutdown, how could they ensure safe and swift recovery? If a key supplier, like AWS or Vodafone, suffered an outage, how would it impact their operations?

Every one of these “what-if” scenarios must be planned, tested and rehearsed so that organisations have backup procedures to safeguard their continuity.

From a communications perspective, this could be as simple as having a functional process and alternative communication lines pre-agreed.

From a cyber incident perspective, organisations can safeguard their continuity through fire drill testing, allowing employees to test their roles and responsibilities, and rehearse recovery scenarios.

When it comes to outages at key tech providers, having backup procedures in place to ensure businesses can still function at some level, is vital. Think about multi-cloud strategies, diversifying internet and telco providers, or business continuity platforms that facilitate offline working models.

The objective of these measures is not perfection; it’s continuity, ensuring that when systems fail, organisations don’t also fall simultaneously.

Building resilience beyond uptime

Too often resilience is mistaken for uptime. In reality, it’s about having the ability to withstand these events without coming to an operational halt. True resilience is not just about avoiding disruption, it’s being prepared to continue through it, whether online or offline.

If you’re interested in a conversation around cyber resilience, our team is here to help.

Get in touch via email: info@ifb.net or call 0330 0166 000.