You’ve likely heard the term “Minimum Viable Product” – a concept popular in the tech startup world. But in the established enterprise, a more critical concept has emerged: the Minimum Viable Business (MVB).
This isn’t just a buzzword; it’s an important principle for ensuring operational resilience, especially in today’s unpredictable business landscape.
What Does Minimum Viable Business Actually Mean?
The term Minimum Viable Business refers to the smallest version of a business that can sustain day-to-day operations. Imagine every system and process, in every department, in your business was shut down tomorrow… which ones would need to start up again before you could ‘do business’?
For a manufacturer; production lines and supply chain operations would likely be considered amongst the most essential functions. In retail; Point of Sale transactions would be a top priority.
Think about what is absolutely essential in your organisation to ‘keep the lights on’ and you’ll begin to get an idea of your MVB.
Why is the concept of Minimum Viable Business gaining traction?
Understanding your MVP has several strategic benefits, including helping to prioritise investment, and improving operational efficiencies – but it’s not these benefits that’s driving the dramatic uptick in interest and adoption of the concept.
The driving force is cyber crime.
Minimum Viable Business and Cyber Crime?
Many businesses don’t need to imagine what it would be like if their whole business was shut down without warning. Cyber crime has made it a very real (and relatively likely) occurrence.
According to IBM’s most recent Cost of a Data Breach Report, 75% of businesses that had experienced an attack, took more that 100 days to fully recover. Less that 3% recovered in under 50 days.
The same study reports that the average cost of a cyber attack to a business is now a massive $4.88 million (USD).
By defining their MVB, businesses can be better prepared for a cyber crisis. They can prioritise the recovery of the IT systems that support their most critical systems – and importantly put their plans to the test. The goal is to significantly reduce disruption and costly business downtime, by getting core operations up and running as fast as possible.
Regulatory Compliance and The Minimum Viable Business
It’s often the case – particularly in large organisations – that regulatory compliance trumps good-practice when it comes to priorities. Put another way, businesses often do what they have to do (compliance), rather than what they should do (good-practice).
When it comes to the rapidly increasing interest and adoption of the concept of the MVB, their is no doubt that it’s regulations that have been the catalist. But in this instance, compliance and good-practice go hand-in-hand.
A raft of regulatory frameworks are coming into force around the world with an emphasis on operational resilience – DORA, HIPAA, FISMA and PRA to name a few. While none of them specifically use the term Minimum Viable Business, there is a common requirement for organisation to demonstrate a robust understanding of their critical operations and demonstrate they have measures in place to ensure they are resilient.
Validating MVB Resilience: Beyond Traditional Approaches
Assuring the recoverability for your most critical IT systems is now a necessity, but traditional approaches, such as tabletop exercises and manual disaster recovery drills, often feel like trying to hit a moving target. Not only are these methods time-consuming and resource-intensive, but they represent a point in time. The don’t accurately reflect the ever changing state of your data or the rapidly evolving threat landscape.
Today, a more proactive, data-driven approach to validating your most critical data and IT systems is needed. Automation and AI have a big role to play. They can:
- Enhanced Speed and Efficiency: Automated testing accelerates the validation process, allowing organisations to quickly identify and address vulnerabilities before they can exploit weaknesses. For example, a retail business can automate tests for its order fulfilment systems, ensuring that critical order processing functions can be restored quickly in the event of a system failure.
– - Proactive Threat Detection: Continuous monitoring allows for identification and response to threats, minimising downtime and accelerating recovery.
– - Uncovering Hidden Vulnerabilities: Automated malware scanning plays a crucial role in identifying and neutralising malicious software that could take down your MVB. For the retail business, this would include regular scans of all systems and devices connected to their network to detect and remove any malware that could compromise customer data, disrupt online sales, or interfere with supply chain operations.
Predatar and Your Minimum Viable Business
Predatar has been designed specifically to validate that backups and snapshots are recoverable and virus free. Many Predatar customers use Predatar’s automation rules and priority node groups to continually validate their MVB systems.
Thanks for Predatar, a national utilities operator is able to validate the recoverability and cleanliness of their most important backups 24/7. For this organisation, system downtime would mean that millions of customers would be without essential utilities. You can read the case study here.
If you’re not familiar with Predatar Recovery Assurance this short video will give you an overview in less than 2 minutes.
Conclusion
In today’s threat-driven environment, organisations must embrace a proactive and dynamic approach to MVB validation. By leveraging automated testing, continuous monitoring, and advanced malware scanning capabilities, organisations can significantly enhance their resilience, minimise downtime, and ensure business continuity in the face of unforeseen challenges. This proactive approach not only protects the bottom line but also strengthens customer trust and solidifies a competitive advantage in the marketplace.
