The role of zero trust and cloud resilience in business continuity

The move to cloud-delivered services for storage, computing, and security has benefited organizations with flexible and scalable systems. The gains of this decades-long computing paradigm change reach far and wide, including in business continuity and disaster recovery.

Natural disasters and physical infrastructure attacks are unfortunately becoming more frequent. Nation-state actors and ransomware gangs are threats always in the corporate spotlight. In turn, corporate boards of directors are increasingly putting more attention on risk and resilience, which includes business continuity planning.

Business continuity isn’t just about recovery; it’s about minimizing disruption and maximizing resilience. Rising expectations mean maintaining critical functions, protecting sensitive data, and providing seamless access to applications, even during disruptions. 

The role of zero trust cybersecurity in business continuity can mean the difference between a minor incident and a full-blown crisis.

Zero trust provides a critical safeguard during disruptions. If a ransomware attack compromises part of the network, access policies can stop the attack from moving laterally, sparing high-value sensitive systems or data. During a service outage, zero trust ensures only certain people ‌are allowed to access backup systems and recovery tools. With the help of zero trust, leaders can maintain operational resilience and productivity during a period of extended downtime.

Key preventive cybersecurity activities like threat intelligence analysis, data protection, and risk management need to continue once a business continuity plan is set into motion. Cloud-based zero trust goes further to help ensure these functions continue during a disaster if it is built on robust, resilient, and redundant infrastructure. Cloud providers that offer regional redundancy, standbys of core infrastructure, operational drills, procedure planning, as well as staffing coverage can be very beneficial in times of crisis.

To avoid financial losses and disruption to the business during an outage, organizations need to provide continued access to critical applications. Capabilities like dynamic failover and private clouds can help maintain secure operations without needing to fall back on legacy security infrastructure like firewalls and VPNs.

Zscaler helps businesses stay operational in the event of a blackout, brownout, or catastrophic failure that could affect the global Zscaler cloud infrastructure. It does this by giving customers continued access to their critical applications from anywhere in the world. 

During normal operations, access to mission-critical applications is brokered via the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange. In a nutshell, if a disaster strikes, all connections to private apps are brokered through the ZPA Private Access Service Edge. An organization hosts these edges on-site or on a cloud service, but Zscaler manages these single-tenant instance brokers. Meanwhile, all connections to the internet and SaaS applications are enforced through policies saved in the AWS S3 bucket. Once Zscaler Cloud functionality is back online, the service is returned ‌to normal operation. 

Customers have control over what business-critical private or SaaS applications users can access to the Zscaler global cloud during an outage. They also can use a DNS-based DR trigger to determine and control when to turn on disaster recovery mode for their zero trust architecture.

Every organization should have a modern, comprehensive business continuity plan and test it regularly against potential scenarios. They should also include cloud providers that host or deliver important applications and services and align on recovery point objectives (RPO), recovery time objectives (RTO), and other quality of service metrics. 

Combined with the most resilient and secure cloud architecture and modern cybersecurity technologies, IT leaders can focus more on other priorities during an outage or natural disaster.     

Learn more about zero trust and business continuity planning.