MVO What? A Quick Need-to-Know Guide To Getting Started.

Are you familiar with the minimum viable organisation (MVO)? Do you know the implications of not having one in the current cyber landscape? If not, don’t worry; you’re not alone. Many businesses neglect to have an MVO as part of their data protection strategy. This blog post will look more at the concept and show how an MVO is essential to ensuring cyber resilience in even the most detrimental situations.

Businesses today rely too heavily on strategies designed to restore services to a previous existing environment. The cyber world has changed business requirements, and bad actors are becoming increasingly sophisticated and usually target backups first to prevent an effective restore. Disaster recovery and business continuity strategies are losing their effectiveness as methods to recover from determined attackers. Instead, it’s necessary to consider cyber resilience strategies that look across all business verticals and ensure that all dependent services can recover.

Modern Enterprise IT architecture rarely focuses on business operations, but consider this: What happens when customers can no longer make a purchase? How about a doctor that can no longer access life-saving medical data? What happens when banks can no longer access the funds of millions of people? Each of these touchpoints is a crucial element within a process chain, and each is considered essential. Despite this, the factors that comprise these process chains – the network, data center, security, and cloud operations – are usually viewed in isolation. Securing only one of these elements is useless if the rest of the chain is left vulnerable. Having a minimum viable organisation defined is the solution.

What is an MVO, and how do I get started?

The MVO refers to the absolute minimum number of systems, people and processes an organisation needs to run effectively. It challenges the notion of what is necessary for a business to continue to operate and provide services. With this knowledge, it’s possible to address critical vulnerabilities throughout the network and orchestrate better resiliency practices.

There needs to be an evolution in how businesses protect and preserve their environments. As previously stated, bad actors are becoming brilliant in their strategies. They know what they are doing and what they are looking for. If they want to get in, they will find a way. No technology today is foolproof, so it’s always about having a last resort to deal with the worst possible scenario. An MVO acts as this position of last resort. When everything else fails, you must be confident that your business’s core processes can function and develop independently.

When it feels like the world is burning down around you, how do you bring back the functions that a business relies on to operate, service its customers, and handle its internal relations? These are the 

difficult questions that must be asked. Cyber attacks are a growing, evolving threat and an inevitability for many businesses. Having an MVO is 

Many businesses have just now considered dwell time. Ransomware may be relatively new, but its damage can be significantly consequential and raises one vital question: if you lose all of your data, what is your position? Knowing that bad actors routinely target backups as a priority, how can you be sure that it’s safe to restore? It no longer takes one massive, unstoppable attack to cripple business operations. Cyber attacks are now coming from within. We need to look at things through a different lens, ensuring that we’re evolving strategies to address emerging challenges and threats.

To begin rebuilding your critical applications for MVO, consider these three points:

• Do I understand my critical applications and how they are built?
• Do I have a comprehensive data protection strategy in place?
• Have I mapped all the service dependencies for these critical apps?
• Can I meet my stated RTO/RPO initiatives in a compromised environment?
• Do I understand the restore option – physical or virtual?
• If my backup system is compromised (encrypted) and I cannot restore, do I know:
  • Where is the software located so it can be rebuilt?
  • Where are the license keys stored?
  • Do I have a certified clean zone that is approved for business resumption?

In the event of a cyberattack, ensure that you understand your dwell time before populating your MVO with data. Make sure your MVO is the hardest thing to find on your network. It could be the difference between cyber resilience and total collapse.

Infront has been building and supporting data protection solutions for the Government for more than 15 years. With the support of Dell Technologies, Infront is now offering Hybrid Cloud Data protection outcome that helps address Essential-8 requirements and provides a strategy for cyber resiliency.

Are you looking to launch your MVO strategy off the ground? Contact us today to discuss how we can create a custom MVO for your organisation. (salessupport@infront.net.au)