Building Resilience with Disaster Recovery Planning

IT business history experienced a drastic change further to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Disaster recovery plans are essential to enable companies shield upon the environment threats. 

One of the most shocking events in human history occurred on September 11, 2001 – The World Trade Center building complex of New York was destroyed by terrorist attacks which took the lives of thousands of people, changed the path of history, and showed the gaps businesses had to protect their information.

This event, a catastrophe in terms of human and economic losses, has also been classified as the greatest disaster in the history of IT. This is so because the companies that used to work in the famous twin towers lost millions of dollars with their data centers disappearance, hosted in the same buildings, without backups or alternative storage sites, or disaster recovery plans or DRPs.

21 years later, the lessons learned from this disaster prepared IT Security Experts to prevent data loss because of different threats: natural disasters, fires, or riots.  All these events that alter ordinary business development may jeopardize companies’ IT infrastructure.

Time and space — Key concepts for recovery 

Disaster Recovery Plans were developed, unifying solutions such as the creation of contingency sites where data center is replicated on a remote location. This enables data storage in both sites, and recovery (if necessary) can be executed in a minimum time.  Additionally, current technologies and appropriate data center management achieve real-time updates.

The main objective of contingency or disaster recovery plans is to assure a business operation reactivation within a minimum period of time.

For an appropriate disaster recovery plan implementation, businesses require the support of data center management experts  with lofty standards of security, availability, and response. Cirion is the appropriate strategic partner since it provides international level technological solutions and high automation indicators, to establish accurate information recovery times depending on business size and type, through in-depth technical analysis, in addition to its highly qualified team of professionals.

Ecuador joins a global trend 

Upon these scenarios, where risk is always there, several companies around the world included this type of plan in their IT management strategy, not only for being aware of how important they are, but several regulations demand this provision as well. In Ecuador, for example, the Law requires financial and insurance entities to have Disaster Recovery Plans in place, due to the criticality of the data and information managed. This requirement also applies to companies with local or international audit processes, which consider these plans to be highly relevant.

Twenty years ago, these plans were meant for self-protection from natural event or force majeure risks, including pandemics. Over time and with the fast technological advance, companies today are vulnerable to a new threat cyberattacks, such as ransomware, malware, phishing, just to mention a few.

Cyber threats have become the highest risk for businesses.  Although Disaster Recovery Plans are not specifically designed to neutralize these dangers, they do contribute to keep the business protected and to assure business continuity without setbacks.

Strategic partner, key condition for protection 

Businesses of all sizes, which have now strongly irrupted into the digital world, need a strategic partner’s support to assess and measure their shielding needs, capable of implementing an effective plan to support their operations and data. 

Disasters happen and businesses need to be prepared for any situation that might disrupt their appropriate operations, partnered with a team of seasoned experts, as well as robust and reliable telecommunications networks, infrastructure, and data centers.

Ricardo Pulgarín
Senior Regional Security Solutions Architect,
Cirion Technologies, Ecuador 

Ricardo Pulgarín Gómez is Senior Regional Security Solutions Architect at Cirion Technologies and has been part of the team since 2017. He is a systems and telecommunications engineer from the University of Manizales, master’s in information technology security, also has multiple certifications in ITIL, AWS PMI, among others. And he has worked in entities such as Experian Data Crédito Colombia S.A., Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Pulgarín is passionate about the security of information technologies that have led him to work on the design of solutions and services of Security Monitoring, Vulnerability Management and Threat Intelligence for Security Operations Centers with protection tools, Incident detection and response.