Coleman Technologies Blog

Every business needs a cyber attack response plan for Lower Mainland businesses that actually works, yet more than half don’t have one. According to CrowdStrike's 2025 State of SMB Cybersecurity Survey, only 47% of small businesses with fewer than 50 employees have a cybersecurity plan in place, leaving 53% completely exposed.

If your company is among them, the next breach attempt isn’t a matter of if. It’s a matter of when. And when it hits, the clock starts ticking.

Cybercriminals are not randomly casting nets across the internet hoping to catch a Fortune 500 company. They’re deliberately targeting businesses like yours. The Verizon 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report confirmed that SMBs are being targeted nearly four times more often than large organizations. The reason is simple. Smaller companies hold valuable data but invest far less in protecting it.

For business owners across the Lower Mainland, from Langley to Burnaby to Surrey, the question is no longer whether your company will face a cyber threat. The question is whether you’ll have a plan ready when it happens.

Why Most Small Businesses Are Flying Blind

A 2025 Guardz SMB Cybersecurity Report found that while 80% of small business owners believe the need for cybersecurity has increased over the past year, only 34% have a formal incident response plan developed with a cybersecurity professional.

That disconnect is a gift to hackers.

Without a cyber attack response plan for Lower Mainland businesses, your team has no roadmap for the critical first hours after a breach. Who do you call first? How do you isolate compromised systems? How do you notify affected clients without creating panic? These are questions that need answers before a crisis, not during one.

The CrowdStrike survey also revealed that 42% of SMBs lack sufficient cybersecurity tools and 46% lack the expertise needed to defend against modern attacks. This means the majority of small businesses aren’t just missing a response plan. They’re missing the foundation to build one.

The stats that should keep you up at night:

• 96% of all SMB breaches fall into just three categories: system intrusion, social engineering, and basic web application attacks, meaning the threats are predictable and preventable with the right plan (Verizon 2025 DBIR)
• 60% of all data breaches involve a human element such as phishing clicks, weak passwords, or social engineering (Verizon 2025 DBIR)
• The average data breach takes 258 days to identify and contain, meaning attackers have roughly eight months of access before they’re detected (IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report 2024)
• 80% of SMBs with a formal incident response plan were able to avoid major damage during an attack (Guardz 2025 SMB Cybersecurity Report)

That last statistic is the most important one. Having a plan doesn’t just reduce risk. It’s the single biggest factor in determining whether your business survives an attack or gets buried by one.

What Happens in the First 24 Hours Without a Plan

Picture this scenario. It’s a Tuesday morning at your office in Surrey. An employee clicks a link in what looks like a routine email from a vendor. Within minutes, ransomware begins encrypting files across your network. Client records, financial data, project files, all locked.

Without a cyber attack response plan for Lower Mainland businesses, here’s what typically happens next: panic. Staff members start making well-intentioned but damaging decisions. Someone reboots a server, destroying forensic evidence. Someone else emails clients from a compromised account, spreading the attack further. Leadership scrambles to find an IT contact while the clock keeps ticking.

The Verizon 2025 DBIR found that ransomware was present in 44% of all breaches analyzed, a notable rise from the prior year. And for SMBs specifically, ransomware was a component of 88% of breaches.

Every minute without a coordinated response increases the damage. It widens the data exposure. It extends the downtime. It multiplies the cost of recovery.

The Real Cost of Having No Response Strategy

The financial consequences of a breach extend far beyond the initial incident. IBM's 2024 Cost of a Data Breach Report found that 70% of breached organizations reported significant or very significant disruption to their operations. Recovery efforts typically extend beyond 100 days, and only 12% of organizations were able to fully recover from a breach.

For small businesses, the impact is proportionally worse. A Hiscox Cyber Readiness Report found that 43% of organizations lost existing customers following a cyberattack. When you’re a 30-person firm in Langley or Abbotsford, losing 43% of your client base is not a setback. It’s an existential threat.

The consequences go beyond lost revenue:

• Regulatory penalties under Canadian privacy laws including PIPEDA
• Loss of client trust that takes years to rebuild
• Increased cyber insurance premiums or loss of coverage entirely
• Operational downtime that halts productivity across every department

The 7 Components of an Effective Cyber Attack Response Plan

Building a cyber attack response plan for Lower Mainland businesses doesn’t require a massive IT department or an unlimited budget. It requires clarity, preparation, and the discipline to put a plan on paper before you need it.

1. Designate Your Incident Response Team

Every business needs to identify who is responsible for what during a cyber incident. This includes an incident commander (typically the business owner or CEO for small companies), an IT lead, a communications point person, and a legal or compliance contact. Everyone should know their role before an incident occurs.

2. Define What Constitutes an Incident

Not every suspicious email is a full-blown breach. Your plan should clearly define the difference between a minor security event and a critical incident that activates your full response protocol. This prevents both underreacting to real threats and overreacting to false alarms.

3. Create an Immediate Containment Protocol

The first priority during any breach is containment. For any incident response plan to work for Lower Mainland companies, it should outline specific steps for isolating affected systems, disabling compromised accounts, and preserving evidence for forensic investigation. The IBM 2024 Cost of a Data Breach Report found that organizations using AI and automation in security operations identified and contained breaches nearly 100 days faster than those without them.

4. Establish a Communication Chain

Who gets notified first? In what order? Through which channels? Your plan should include:

• Internal notification procedures for staff and leadership
• Client communication templates ready for immediate deployment
• Regulatory notification timelines required under PIPEDA
• Media response guidelines if the breach becomes public

5. Document Your Critical Assets and Data

You can’t protect what you haven’t identified. Your plan should include a current inventory of all critical systems, data storage locations, backup protocols, and access credentials. This documentation becomes your recovery roadmap.

6. Partner with a Managed IT Provider Before You Need One

Trying to find a qualified cybersecurity partner during an active breach is like shopping for home insurance while your house is on fire. A proactive managed IT provider should be part of your cyber attack response strategy from day one, providing 24/7 monitoring, rapid incident response, and the expertise your internal team likely doesn’t have.

The CrowdStrike survey found that only 11% of SMBs use AI-powered cybersecurity tools. A separate VikingCloud study revealed that 74% of small business owners self-manage their cybersecurity or rely on an untrained family member or friend. That approach might save money in the short term, but it leaves your business dangerously exposed.

7. Test Your Plan Regularly

A plan that sits in a drawer is not a plan. It’s a wish. IBM's 2024 Cost of a Data Breach Report found that organizations with an incident response team that regularly tested their plan experienced 58% lower breach costs than those that didn’t. Yet among the three-quarters of organizations that had an IR plan, only 63% had a dedicated team and tested it on a regular basis.

Effective testing includes:

• Tabletop exercises at least twice a year simulating realistic attack scenarios
• Verifying that backup restoration actually works before you need it in a crisis
• Reviewing and updating contact lists, access credentials, and vendor agreements
• Debriefing after every test to identify gaps and improve response procedures

Why Lower Mainland Businesses Face Unique Risks

The Lower Mainland's business landscape creates specific cybersecurity challenges that generic advice doesn’t address. The region's concentration of professional services firms, legal offices, construction companies, and accounting practices means a high volume of sensitive client data flows through relatively small organizations every day.

Consider the typical law firm in Langley handling real estate transactions, or the accounting practice in Surrey managing payroll for dozens of construction companies. These businesses process financial records, personal identification documents, and confidential business data on a daily basis. A single breach could expose hundreds of clients simultaneously.

A cyber attack response plan for Lower Mainland businesses needs to account for Canadian regulatory requirements under PIPEDA, provincial privacy considerations, and the reality that many Fraser Valley and Greater Vancouver firms serve clients across multiple industries with varying compliance standards. What works for a tech startup in downtown Vancouver won’t work for a unionized construction firm in Abbotsford. Your plan needs to reflect your specific industry, your specific data, and your specific regulatory obligations.

Additionally, the region's growing reliance on hybrid and remote work arrangements has expanded the attack surface for many local businesses. Employees accessing company systems from home networks, personal devices, and public Wi-Fi connections create vulnerabilities that didn’t exist five years ago. Every unsecured endpoint is another door for an attacker to walk through.

Stop Hoping It Won’t Happen to You

Hope is not a cybersecurity strategy. The data is clear. More than half of small businesses lack a response plan. Attackers know this. They’re counting on it.

Building a cyber attack response plan for Lower Mainland businesses is not about achieving perfect security. Perfect security doesn’t exist. It’s about ensuring that when something goes wrong, your team knows exactly what to do, who to call, and how to minimize the damage.

The businesses that survive cyber attacks are not the ones with the biggest budgets. They’re the ones with the best preparation.

If you don’t have a plan in place today, you’re gambling with everything you have built. And the odds are not in your favor.

Sources:

1. CrowdStrike, "2025 State of SMB Cybersecurity Survey" (2025)
2. Verizon, "2025 Data Breach Investigations Report" (2025)
3. IBM Security / Ponemon Institute, "Cost of a Data Breach Report 2024" (2024)
4. Guardz, "2025 SMB Cybersecurity Report" (December 2025)
5. Hiscox, "Cyber Readiness Report 2024" (2024)
6. VikingCloud, "SMB Cybersecurity Study" (2025)

Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR) are incredibly important elements of any successful business, as without them, you’re just one disaster away from a world-shattering wake-up call. We take a strategic approach to data backup and disaster recovery that considers your daily data backup needs while recognizing its long-term benefits. Let’s discuss how you can ensure that your business can use BDR to survive any potential threat the world throws at it.

World Backup Day, observed on March 31st annually, serves as a designated occasion to underscore the critical importance of regular data backups for ensuring data continuity. Although this day effectively highlights a fundamental best practice, we firmly advocate for a continuous commitment to maintaining and safeguarding backups rather than confining such awareness to a single day.

Data Backup and Disaster Recovery are essential components of any modern business. As businesses become increasingly reliant on digital data, it's essential to have strategies in place to ensure that your data is safe and secure in the event of a disaster. Let’s cover the key components of an effective Disaster Recovery strategy to ensure the safety of your business' data backup. Read on to learn more about Disaster Recovery strategies and how to best protect your business data.

The modern business technology market is filled with exciting innovations, but one area that doesn't quite capture the imagination is data backup. Perhaps backup is not the most thrilling topic, but nevertheless, the growing demand for enhanced data security and redundancy in businesses is driving developers to push the boundaries of the technology, creating more advanced features to meet the growing demand for redundancy. Today, we take a look at three intriguing features of these emerging data backup solutions.

Tape backup has been used for a long time, and it was once the most prominent solution for data backup out there. Nowadays, it’s not used much at all, mostly in favor of better and more convenient solutions. However, there has been a slight resurgence in tape backup, so we want to look at why some companies might still use it, despite its flaws.

Data is the lifeblood of a business. In the event of unforeseen circumstances such as hardware failure, malware attacks, or human error, having a well-designed backup and data recovery strategy in place becomes paramount. Today, we try and guide you through the process of creating a robust backup and data recovery strategy, ensuring the safety and accessibility of your data.

We often discuss data backup and disaster recovery on our blog, and you may even be familiar with some of the terms and practices we throw around. Today, we want to take a closer look at the 3-2-1 rule and how it impacts your business’ ability to recover in the face of a disaster. Let’s dive in and see how the 3-2-1 rule can make or break your company’s data infrastructure.

A disaster can take many forms, from a raging snowstorm to deleting the wrong file. Regardless of what kind of disaster you face, you can know that it doesn’t take much to impact a business, especially if the business doesn’t have a business continuity plan in place. How does your business recover from such a devastating scenario? How can it get its data back and in proper working order? That’s what we want to tell you about today.

The Importance of Testing Data Backup and Recovery Systems

Data backup protects a business from catastrophic data loss resulting from hardware failures, natural disasters, cybersecurity attacks, system outages, or network disruptions. Backing up data involves replicating it and storing it in different places. Such as the cloud, backup servers, and dedicated backup devices. This way, you can recover your data and information from a previous state and time in case of system outages. However, the efficiency and effectiveness of data backup are reduced drastically when you do not test them regularly and routinely. Data backup and recovery testing is the process of assessing the effectiveness of the systems, procedures, and methods that a company uses to replicate, store, and retrieve data in times of need.

Why Do You Need Data Backup?

This is pretty self-explanatory. Your business is constantly under threat. You may not realize it because you’ve been fortunate enough not to have any threat be bad enough where your operational and financial data is actively at risk. That may not always be the case, however. Consider how important your data is and think about all the things that could happen where you would have to deal with data loss. Situations that stem from natural disasters, scams and hackers, hardware failure, and human error can all trigger data loss. That’s a lot of variables to cover to keep hoping that nothing will happen. 

Using BDR

If you want data redundancy for your business in the information age, you need to get a BDR. Not only is your data backed up locally, it is also pushed to the cloud. Having data on site is great if you need to quickly restore something, or if your server crashes and you need a substitute server, while cloud backup is great for protecting the data in case of a major disaster that knocks out your onsite hardware. 

In reality, it takes several different tools to make a network as secure as it needs to be.

Why a Firewall Isn’t Enough

A firewall serves only one purpose, and that’s to monitor traffic that goes in and out of your network for any security issues. However, it’s important to remember that there are threats that can bypass firewalls, and that there are other components of network security besides monitoring traffic.

Protect Your Backup

Your business’ backup can be viewed as an insurance policy, but if it isn’t secured, it could be just another piece of a string of errors that takes your business down. In order for your backup to be a reliable contingency, you need to protect it. In order to do that, we suggest using the 3-2-1 rule as a base. That is: three copies of your data, with two being stored and attached to your network, and one saved offsite. 

A Little Background 

One of the biggest risks a business owner needs to address is what needs to happen if there is a situation where their business is disrupted. There has to be a series of actions taken that will allow for a thorough assessment of the situation and a return to productivity. These tasks don’t just solve the problems surrounding an issue, they are a strategy to ensure operational resilience.

As more and more people are dealing with the virus and its effects on commerce, supply chains are failing and distribution patterns are completely disrupted. This has had a devastating effect on the world economy. It isn’t like a hurricane or a flood, but an outbreak, like most other disasters, hit business’ suddenly and has led many to enact their disaster recovery strategies. Today, we are going to discuss how IT fits into disaster recovery. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has certainly thrown us all for a loop, with many businesses wisely choosing to close their office doors, either scaling back their operations or choosing to utilize a more mobile workforce. While this clearly qualifies as a disaster, it isn’t one that holds too many risks against your data; at least, not when compared to some others. This gives us a chance to consider how well-prepared we are for other disasters that could pose more of a threat to the information and files your operations depend on. For instance, how would you respond if something were to happen to your actual business infrastructure (and, by association, any data you had stored there)?

While not all of your data may be equally valuable, data loss is a bad thing across the board. This is precisely why Coleman Technologies offers comprehensive data backup and disaster recovery solutions.

Backing up your data allows you to sidestep the potential catastrophes that would come with the loss of your most critical information. Here, we’ll review a few situations that could put this data at risk to demonstrate how crucial having a backup really is.

Situation: Actual Disaster Event

Just about every business on Earth could potentially be impacted by some kind of weather event. Some deal with hurricanes, some deal with high winds and tornadoes, others with earthquakes and floods… you get the picture. Unfortunately, whichever one impacts your business, there isn’t very much you can do in the moment - which is why it is important to prepare now, so you can reopen again after the fact. Many don’t prepare, and therefore, don’t reopen.

Acting proactively and maintaining a backup allows you to more quickly bounce back after disaster has struck, allowing your business a second chance.

Situation: Data Corruption or Theft

Cybersecurity is a huge topic today, as there are many, many threats out there designed to target businesses. Take ransomware, for example: all it takes for you to lose access to your files is for an employee to click on the wrong thing. Not good.

However, using a BDR (in conjunction with a comprehensive business continuity plan) to keep your files safely backed up enables you to quickly restore data from an onsite backup copy of your data, while keeping another copy offsite for redundant protections and simplified migrations. This keeps you safe from a variety of threats, including ransomware and many other forms of malware. 

Situation: The Classic Office “Whoops!” Moment

The BDR is supremely useful in that it gives you an on-demand resource to pull your data from, on demand, as it is needed. This is particularly handy if a team is collaborating on a project, and somebody accidentally deletes something absolutely critical to the project. With a backup, your progress won’t be lost to bad luck.

A BDR allows you to breathe a little easier about your files and their security. To find out about adopting one for your business, reach out to Coleman Technologies today. Call (604) 513-9428 to get started.

Keeping Your Strategy Simple

One basic strategy to sorting out your data is to backup the files that you can’t feasibly replace otherwise. This simple, yet effective approach could easily save your business… but, why go through the effort of sorting through your data at all?

Seeing as your data is one of - if not the - most important resources that your business has, why not just back up all of it?

This endeavor becomes much easier with the Backup and Disaster Recovery appliance that we offer, as it can easily map out and replicate your data stores. Now, it must be said that not every business generates enough vital data to justify a large investment into a data backup. However, as we mentioned above, today’s threat landscape means that what data you do have needs to be protected.

Your Backup Options

There are several different varieties of data backup for you to consider, keeping in mind what it is you are backing up and when you need those backups to be ready. These backups include:

Full Backups

As you may have gathered, a full backup copies all of your data and configurations and saves them to a single platform, whether that be a NAS (network attached storage) device, a cloud backup, or tape (pro tip: don’t use tape backup).

This has the benefits of offering a comprehensive backup that you need, with quick restoration times for single files or folders. A full restore takes a much longer period of time to complete, and full backups are more expensive due to the greater need of storage space. Any backup strategy will typically start off with a full backup.

Incremental Backups

This kind of backup keeps track of any changes that are made to data, which allows it to be used for data that is continuously updated. The costs of an incremental backup are quite reasonable, making it a good choice (despite not being totally comprehensive) for a business that generates large amounts of data.

Differential Backups

Similarly to incremental backups, a differential backup keeps track of changes that are made between the times that a full backup is run, keeping their backups more up to date.

Mirror Backup

This kind of backup is best for redundancy, as it creates a mirror image of the system that is being backed up. While these backups are the fastest to restore, they also take up the most storage space.

Depending on your business’ particular needs, a backup can be run weekly, daily, or even as frequently as every 15 minutes.

Following the 3-2-1 Rule

The 3-2-1 Rule is a simple way to remember what you need to maintain if you want to keep your data protected enough. Here’s how it breaks down:

• 3 copies of your data
• 2 stored on different media types
• 1 copy offsite

This strategy makes it so your data is both secure, and convenient to you.

To learn more about data backups and best practices concerning them, reach out to Coleman Technologies at (604) 513-9428.

You may be one of those small or medium-sized business owners that believe that anything labeled “enterprise” is overkill for your business. This may be true in some other cases, but when you start talking about data backup solutions, enterprise is a good thing. To protect your data--and effectively your business--you need a solution that will handle all the data you need to backup while keeping that data available for restore at the drop of a hat. If you don’t have this, any situation that could separate you from your data could seriously negatively affect your business’ ability to deal with adverse situations.  

The Problems That Are Solved With BDR

The main problem the BDR immediately solves is the one that is caused when your business depends on its data. If that data somehow gets altered, corrupted, or destroyed, having copies of it will keep your business in the game. A BDR can also keep lengthy periods of downtime to a minimum. Some of the options the modern BDR presents include:

• Frequent data backup (as low as every 15 minutes) 
• Onsite and offsite copies of data 
• Fast restoration to reduce downtime
• Archiving and other server-level functions
• Bare-metal restores for drive-to-drive data migration

With our experienced staff behind your BDR, you get the strong continuity, efficient restore speed, offsite cloud storage, and the ease of implementation that allows for backups to start almost immediately. To learn how our BDR can help you protect your business reach out today at (604) 513-9428.