Designing a cyber resilience strategy with AWS and PwC

Cyber resilience offerings framework

Topic 1: How do we deploy an environment that’s air-gapped from the primary network? Common considerations are as follows:

Topic 2: How many copies of data do you keep to make sure it’s safeguarded and how do you confirm your vault data is not compromised?

• The raw data from the input source is initially copied and stored in the ingress zone.

• In the analytics zone, this data undergoes analysis to confirm that no corrupt data is transferred to the cyber vault.

• Once confirmed to be error-free, the data is stored in write-once read-many (WORM) compliant storage, which prevents any modifications after writing. This ensures the data remains secure and can be safely used during a ransomware incident.

• In such an event, data from the vault zone can be further examined for anomalies before being utilized for recovery.

• The recovery process retrieves data from the vault through the egress zone. By maintaining separate ingress and egress zones, we safeguard the vault from external access, confirming that only authorized services can access the data.

Topic 3: How do you recover your environment from the configurations and data stored in the vault?

One of the most effective ways to recover from a cyber attack is to have a reliable and fast backup process. It often involves restoring to a previous point-in-time just before the attack occurred.

PwC has developed the disaster recovery orchestrator framework on AWS to enable resiliency across an organization’s foundational AWS environment and application services, reducing the dependency on various supporting teams required to conduct regular disaster recovery testing. The disaster recovery framework is a customizable solution that can automate the failover of critical services to a healthy AWS region in the event of an incident and the failback of AWS services to their original state.

This framework can be used to orchestrate the failover activities in a disaster scenario by making API calls into the vault zone and creating an environment from the latest backups.

For modernizing resiliency and response, we often help clients address questions such as:

• What are the core challenges with designing for cyber resilience in the cloud? 

• How do organizations handle and respond to outages and disruption in services from a cyber event?

If you would like help in addressing these questions or want to explore any of the focus areas listed above, reach out to us.