The Critical lesson from Clorox’s Cyberattack Recovery: Rebuilding is as Important as Restoring Data

In an era where ransomware threats loom large, the recent cyberattack on The Clorox Company serves as a stark reminder of the vulnerability of even the most prepared organizations. Despite having robust backup and recovery solutions in place, as well as a comprehensive Business Continuity Planning (BCP) program, Clorox still faced significant downtime, taking almost a month to recover critical systems. This incident, detailed in a report by Industry Week, underscores a vital aspect often overlooked in cybersecurity strategy: the capability to rebuild.

Understanding the challenge

When a cyberattack cripples an organization’s IT infrastructure, the immediate response is often to restore from backups. However, as the Clorox incident illustrates, data restoration is only one piece of the puzzle. The ability to rapidly rebuild application environments and other IT systems is equally crucial. This process involves more than just data recovery; it requires a comprehensive strategy to restore full operational capabilities, including software, configurations, services, and network setups.

The missing piece: Rapid Rebuilding

In the face of such challenges, organizations must look beyond traditional recovery methods. Enter the concept of rapid rebuilding — a proactive approach focusing on quickly re-establishing operational infrastructure. This includes:

• Automated Rebuilding Processes: Leveraging automation to speed up the rebuilding of cloud environments, ensuring minimal downtime and operational disruption.
• Recovery-as-Code: Having ready-to-deploy system configurations can significantly reduce the time taken to get systems back online. Particularly if the environments can be recreated using infrastructure code-based automation.
• Regular testing and updates: Continuously testing and updating recovery and rebuilding plans to ensure they keep pace with evolving IT landscapes.

How Appranix can help

Understanding the importance of rapid rebuilding in the wake of a cyberattack, the Appranix platform offers cloud resilience solutions. By focusing on rapidly rebuilding cloud environments, Appranix helps organizations not only restore their data in another isolated network or even a different cloud region but also their operational capabilities swiftly. The benefits include:

• Speed: Rapidly reconstruct entire cloud environments, including applications, data, services, and dependencies, significantly cutting down recovery time.
• Automation: Minimize manual intervention, reducing the likelihood of errors during the recovery process.
• Resilience: Strengthen organizational resilience against future cyber threats with configuration drift analysis.

Conclusion

The recovery journey of The Clorox Company is a clear indicator that in the digital age, the ability to quickly rebuild after a cyberattack is just as critical as the ability to restore data. As organizations continue to navigate the complex cybersecurity landscape, solutions like those offered by Appranix will become increasingly vital in ensuring operational continuity and resilience.