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Doomsday Prep: How to Keep Your Business Alive During a Ransomware Attack

With 88 percent of organizations facing at least one ransomware attack annually, the focus must shift from just prevention to survival. The solution: Minimum Viable Recovery (MVR) — a practical approach to recovering just enough to keep the business running. This is about achieving Minimum Viable Business, not full restoration.

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  1. Doomsday prep: How to keep your business alive during a ransomware attack

 Doomsday prep: How to keep your business alive during a ransomware attack

If an asteroid were found to be hurtling through space with a less than 1% chance of hitting Earth, would you prepare to survive the impact?

Maybe not.

But what if that asteroid had an 88 percent chance of impact?

You'd prepare. You'd stock supplies, build a plan and rehearse it.

That's the current reality with ransomware. According to a Ponemon Institute study, 88% of organizations have experienced one or more ransomware attacks in the past year. The damage is more than digital — it disrupts operations, halts revenue, and can threaten the survival of the business itself.

The question isn't just how to prevent an attack — it's how to survive one.

That's why organizations must adopt a Minimum Viable Recovery (MVR) plan. This isn't about restoring everything. It's about restoring enough to stay alive.

We call it Minimum Viable Business. And it starts with MVR.

 What Minimum Viable Recovery looks like

1. Restore Business Before Systems
MVR focuses on restoring the minimum set of systems, access, and data your business needs to function. Think payroll, logistics, customer communication — not every desktop image or dev server.

2. Protect the Crown Jewels
Identify and secure the critical components of your environment: Active Directory, DNS, privileged access, and the applications that drive your revenue. These need to be recovered first, often from a clean, isolated vault.

3. Define the Recovery Roles and Playbooks
A crisis is not the time to make decisions. MVR includes tested playbooks and clear roles. Who leads? Who communicates? What gets restored and in what order? All of that should be decided in advance.

4. Set Realistic RTO and RPO Goals
Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) must reflect what's necessary to operate — not a perfect restoration. Focus on what's essential, not everything.

5. Build a Secure Recovery Path
You can't recover from compromised infrastructure. MVR includes a secure, isolated recovery path — like a clean-room environment or temporary tenant — that allows your team to rebuild without relying on infected systems.

6. Make it Repeatable and Auditable
A recovery plan is only as good as its last test. MVR must be sustainable, documented, and auditable. This keeps you aligned with governance and ready for regulatory scrutiny.

 Why WWT is built for this


WWT helps organizations prepare for, withstand, and recover from the inevitable. We bring together:

Deep Cyber Resilience Expertise: Our consultants have led recovery strategies for critical infrastructure, global banks, healthcare providers, and Fortune 100 companies.

Real-World Recovery Experience: We don't just theorize recovery. We build, test, and operationalize real environments using isolated recovery zones, vault-as-a-service, and full-stack resilience architecture.

Cross-Disciplinary Strength: Our strength spans cybersecurity, IT operations, cloud engineering, data protection, and business continuity. That means we can solve not just for security — but for sustained business operations.

Quantifiable Risk Reduction: Through quantitative risk analysis and prioritized maturity roadmaps, we help clients make informed investments that deliver measurable resilience — not just compliance.

If you're ready to prepare for the next impact — and emerge stronger — WWT is ready to help.

Start with what matters. Recover what's essential. Stay in business.
That's the power of Minimum Viable Recovery — and the advantage of having WWT by your side.