Minimum Viable Resilience is a concept being more thoroughly explored now, derived from the more well-known Minimum Viable Business (MVB), itself a term borrowed from Software’s Minimum Viable Product. Let’s look at what it can look like and why it’s worth pursuing:
The concept of a Minimum Viable Company is, in brief, identifying the essential services, processes and functions that must remain operational to keep the organization financially, operationally and strategically viable. Or to put it in other words, how much disruption your company can take and still stay afloat.
The concept has grown in prominence since national and supernational regulations and guidelines have begun to emphasize it (The EU’s DORA as well as some statements from the British government in particular).
What does this mean?
MVR is resilience oriented around maintaining at least an MVC. If a cyberattack or other disruption triggers your disaster recovery plan, the first priority is getting back to a Minimum Viable Company baseline. Once the MVC is re-established in a crisis, the focus can shift to rebuilding sustainable operations – restoring full functionality – rebuilding the underpinning technology, recovering the rest of the business, and returning to profitability.
In other words, it’s “just” Disaster Recovery as normal – but with a change in planning and emphasis to make it tighter and more focused, allowing a systematic recovery to baseline instead of frantic attempts to achieve normalcy at all costs.
Why should we bother?
Disruptions are becoming increasingly frequent, and as we have touched on in the past many organizations (for various reasons) are not adequately prepared to deal with them. A severe percentage of organizations still do not maintain a backup of their critical business data. Those that do may not have their disaster recovery planned out, and key figures may not be networked together for that purpose.
Furthermore, not all disruptions are created equal. Multi-extortion ransomware attacks may bypass backups or mean backups only imperfectly restore you to baseline. Supply chain disruptions can cause key providers to encounter issues (as a few months ago, when Cloudflare went down across Europe for a critical few hours).
Under traditional recovery, firms can encounter downtime for hours if not days while teams work feverishly to restore them back to their previous state. These are hours and days where your costs mount and your company is stuck in paralysis. Minimum viable resilience expects you to plan around this downtime, prioritize systems, ensure continued access (greatly aided by restoreless access to backups or archives of data) and bring yourself back up to a functioning minimum as fast as possible before seeking a return to normalcy.
Your Data In Your Hands – With TECH-ARROW
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