Disaster Recovery Planning and the Role of IAM Resilience

Protecting your organization’s systems and data during normal operations is challenging enough, but ensuring your digital environment will remain secure and available when disaster strikes is a new level of difficulty.

As cyberattacks become more frequent and sophisticated, the risk that a successful attack will degrade or eliminate your organization’s ability to function is increasing daily. Add to this the potential for disasters such as fire, extreme weather, earthquakes, or power outages to leave your organization dead in the water, and the critical nature of a disaster recovery strategy becomes apparent.

Many leading organizations understand the importance of backup and disaster recovery and have implemented cloud-based disaster recovery processes to at least some extent. Organizations commonly ensure that critical data such as business, financial, and customer data is regularly backed up and reliable data backup and recovery mechanisms are in place.

Yet proper Identity Access Management (IAM) resilience often falls short in many organizations’ disaster recovery processes, despite the pivotal role IAM plays in ensuring organizations can operate smoothly while maintaining security and operational continuity. Ensuring business continuity is critical, especially when using virtual machines or recovery as a service solution.

Many organizations discover too late that they have failed to account for IAM resilience in their disaster recovery plans. In these cases, organizations often cannot recover their backed-up data after a disaster. The failure to sufficiently back up and recover IAM data leaves employees, customers, and business partners unable to access critical systems and data, resulting in catastrophic financial, operational, and reputational impacts.

According to Jason Lish, Cisco Global CISO and MightyID Board Member:

“IAM resilience is becoming a bigger concern among executives and Boards of Directors. As cyber attackers seem to be focusing on IAM environments as a single point of failure, Boards are asking for a backup plan and accountability.”

In this blog post, we’ll provide a summary of disaster recovery strategy and IAM resilience, explore the role of IAM resilience in DRP, and explain how MightyID can help organizations implement state-of-the-art IAM resilience in their DRP to ensure employees, customers, and business partners can continue accessing critical applications and data during and after a disaster.

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‍What is IAM Disaster Recovery Planning?

Disaster Recovery Planning (DRP) is creating policies, procedures, and tools that ensure the rapid recovery of critical applications, systems, and data following a catastrophic event such as a cyberattack, natural disaster, or substantial systems failure. A key component of an organization’s overall business continuity strategy exists to ensure operational resilience through cloud-based disaster recovery services.

DRP aims to minimize downtime and ensure that an organization’s operations can continue with minimal disruption when a disaster hits.

The results of the Disaster Recovery Planning process are documented in a Disaster Recovery Plan, which includes the following key elements:

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• Risk Assessment and Business Impact Analysis (BIA): Identify potential risks and assess the impact of different types of disasters on business operations. This helps organizations prepare for disasters, implement measures to mitigate risks and prioritize recovery efforts and resource allocation.

• Recovery Objectives:
  
  • RTO (Recovery Time Objective): Defines the maximum acceptable time to restore systems and resume normal operations.
  • RPO (Recovery Point Objective): This objective defines the maximum acceptable amount of data loss measured in time. It defines how far back in time the recovery must go to restore data.

• Backup Strategy: Defines regular data backup routines (e.g., daily, weekly, continuous) and storage locations (on-prem, cloud, or hybrid) to ensure backups are secure and can be quickly recovered during a disaster.

• Disaster Recovery Sites: Documents disaster recovery on cloud options, including:
  
  • Hot Sites: Fully operational backup sites that can assume operational responsibility immediately.
  • ‍Cold Sites: Sites that provide basic infrastructure and require the setup of systems and data before they can become operational.
  • Warm Sites: Sites that strike a balance between hot and cold and include some pre-configured infrastructure.
• Disaster Recovery Policies and Procedures: Documents policies and procedures for regularly backing up data and restoring it during a disaster.
• Incident Response and Communication Plan: Clearly define team members' roles and responsibilities and communicate protocols to keep stakeholders informed during a disaster.
• Testing and Maintenance: Describes how the Data Recovery Plan will be reviewed and tested regularly (e.g., disaster recovery testing) and how it will be adapted over time to address emerging risks, technologies, and changes in the business environment.
• Automation and Cloud Services: Documents vendors, tools, and recovery solutions used to prepare for and recover from disasters, including Microsoft Azure (now renamed to Entra ID) and other popular platforms.

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‍What is Identity Access Management Data?

IAM data is information used by Identity and Access Management systems to manage and control access to an organization’s digital resources. It includes details about users, roles, permissions, and policies that determine which users can access specific applications and data and what functions they are authorized to perform.

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‍What is Identity Access Management Resilience?

IAM resilience is an organization’s ability to maintain secure and reliable control over user access to its systems, data, and applications, even when faced with potentially catastrophic events such as cyberattacks, natural disasters, or significant systems failures.

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‍What is the Role of IAM Resilience in Disaster Recovery Planning?

IAM resilience is a critical component of effective disaster recovery planning. It enables employees, customers, and business partners to have secure access to a company's digital environment if a disaster occurs.

The following key elements of IAM resilience should be incorporated in your DRP:

• Ensure Continuity of Authentication and Authorization: Implement redundant IAM systems and IAM data to ensure that user authentication and authorization services are available during and after a disaster, even if your primary IAM environment becomes unavailable. Many MightyID customers maintain multiple IAM tenants with the same IdP (such as multiple Okta tenants) or within multiple IdPs (such as a primary Okta tenant with a backup PingOne environment).

• Ensure Security and Compliance: When DRP processes are invoked, ensure that IAM controls are in place to meet security and compliance requirements. This includes ensuring security and compliance across all backup and recovery functions and environments, including backup IdP, cloud, operating systems, data centers, and hybrid platforms.

• Provide Appropriate Access for the Recovery Team: Ensure that authenticated recovery team members have immediate access to the tools and systems they need to execute disaster recovery processes swiftly.

• Enable User Access Revocation: In some scenarios, a disaster recovery plan will call for user access to some systems or data to be revoked as part of an incident response protocol. This is often done to defend against insider threats or limit access to ensure resources can be dedicated to the recovery team in the immediate aftermath of a disaster. Ensure mechanisms are in place to revoke user access in these scenarios quickly.

• Develop IAM Resilience Procedures: Develop and document procedures to mitigate IAM-related risks identified in DRP and describe the IAM processes that will be followed to prepare for and respond to a disaster (e.g., IAM data and systems backup and recovery, recovery team roles and responsibilities, user access revocation, incident response communication plans).

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How MightyID Can Help

MightyID is a powerful, flexible, and comprehensive IAM resilience platform that significantly alleviates the challenges of managing workforce and Customer Identity Access Management (CIAM) identities. Its capabilities include:

• Backup and Restore—Backup and restore for your Okta tenant or other IAM tenant, including large IAM data sets and migrating configurations between staging, production, and other tenants.

• IAM Migration — Port complex identity objects across multiple IdPs for purposes of a vendor switch.

• IdP Failover — Execute emergency failover and recovery across multiple IdPs.

MightyID supports leading IdPs, including:

• Okta

• Auth0

• Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Microsoft Azure)

• PingOne

It supports virtually any application integrated with your IAM environment, including Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Box, Amazon Web Services, Salesforce, Zoom, DocuSign, Slack, and hundreds more. Click here to download a list of the 250 most common applications we support.

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The Bottom Line

Unfortunately, many companies are unprepared for a disruption in their IAM platform. Most IAM customers are unaware that backups are their responsibility, not the IDPs. This leaves organizations unknowingly vulnerable to catastrophic events. You won’t have days or hours to return to normal operations when a disaster strikes. This is why it’s critical to incorporate IAM resilience in your DRP.

The MightyID platform offers unparalleled capabilities that can significantly streamline the process of implementing state-of-the-art IAM resilience in your DRP. Our team would happily arrange a demo or answer your questions about this critical topic.