Setting Up An Operational Resilience Framework

You are in charge of disaster response and recovery at your organization and you have just been hit with a wiperware attack. Your team has executed its playbook to retrieve data from your back-up files.  However, all of your organization’s systems, applications, networks, and devices are inaccessible.

You quickly realize that by following traditional disaster recovery practices you have focused almost exclusively on data recovery, with little regard for providing critical services to customers as you work to recover fully from this crisis.

This is the nightmare that many enterprises have faced when they have become victims of a destructive attack.  

Today’s cyberthreat landscape illustrates the need for enterprises to not just have back-ups of user and business data, but to also have immutable and distributed backups of applications, systems, networks, processes and other critical services to enable swift recovery of operations. It has become clear that just having good back-ups of data is an inadequate business response.   

Without the ability to quickly restore minimal viable service levels with accurate data and restoration of critical applications, networks, devices and systems architecture, organizations are at high risk of extending disruption from attacks. Executive management, shareholders, customers and then journalists will ask legitimate questions regarding how quickly minimal service levels can be restored. How have you prepared for this type of attack? 

Three years ago, Global Resilience Federation’s Business Resilience Council (BRC) launched a multi-sector working group to establish a framework to address all aspects of data, systems, and processes recovery from a destructive attack. The ORF’s multi-sector volunteer team of experts included security and resilience practitioners and consultants from many industry sectors. The working group spent over two years to develop the Operational Resilience Framework (ORF) which was then reviewed by over a hundred organization before version 1.0 was released (www.grf.org/orf). 

The ORF provides rules and implementation aids that support a company’s recovery of data, systems and processes based on establishment of minimum viable services levels and objectives for immutable backup and recovery. The ORF is a vendor agnostic solution and establishes a set of rules that are uniquely not prescriptive with a goal of reaching a goal of operational resilience for the enterprise that is consistent with existing standards.

 A summary of the path towards operational resilience identified by the ORF include:

1. Implement an industry-recognized standard IT and cybersecurity controls framework.
2. Understand the organization’s role in the ecosystem. 
3. Conduct an inventory and allocate business processes, systems, and data sets into three categories- Operations Critical, Business Critical, and Business as Usual.
4. Define your organization’s impact tolerance for disruptions to each Operations Critical service. 
5. Preserve the Data Sets necessary to support Operations Critical and Business Critical services.
6. Develop Operations Resilience processes to enable recovery and restoration of Operations Critical and Business Critical services within acceptable impact tolerances.
7. Independently evaluate design and test periodically.

The ORF is designed to be broadly applicable, with downloadable documents including:  

• Rules targeted to practitioners with information on the steps, terminology, implementation aids, and future activities.

• A mapping of the rules to NIST and ISO controls.

• A glossary document with defined key terms.

• A business-oriented implementation scenario to explain use cases in the form of a plausible incident.

In the face of a destructive cyberattack or massive natural disaster, enterprises must plan to mitigate the impact based on pre-established minimal viable service levels and objectives. Don’t be unprepared.

The ORF working group is now working on various ORF implementation tools including a maturity model, training programs and operational resilience exercises for multiple sectors. Visit www.grf.org/orf to download the complimentary documents to enhance your organization’s resilience against destructive events and maintain operational continuity.  

Bill Nelson is Chair at the Global Resilience Federation

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