Imagine this: a large financial services firm faces a ransomware attack, rendering its corporate endpoints unusable just as it finalizes a major acquisition. Employees can’t access critical SaaS apps, customer data is out of reach, and productivity grinds to a halt.

In today's fast-paced digital world, business continuity is not just a strategic advantage—it's a requirement. Ensuring your organization can maintain essential functions during and after a disaster or other temporary outage minimizes downtime and safeguards operations. For some businesses, even the shortest downtime can be critical.

With a robust business continuity plan, your business can avoid severe repercussions, including financial losses, reputation damage, operational disruption and legal issues. Failure to maintain business continuity in regulated industries can also lead to legal penalties and noncompliance fines.

Critical Moments That Demand Business Continuity

Global or Regional Crisis

Global crises, such as pandemics, international conflicts or natural disasters, can severely disrupt normal business operations. These events challenge organizations to rely on something other than an employee's location to access resources or ensure a solid security posture.

The COVID-19 pandemic, for example, highlighted the necessity for businesses to quickly adapt to remote working and ensure that operations could continue despite widespread disruptions. At the same time, organizations faced a global shortage of laptops, eliminating the option of shipping computers to remote employees to allow them to access business resources.

Several international conflicts in the last few years have also demonstrated that businesses can and must continue operating in extreme circumstances as long as employees can access critical resources in alternative ways.

IT Outages

IT shutdowns can bring an organization to a standstill, whether due to hardware failure, software issues or human error. For instance, if an organization experiences an endpoint management system failure, IT might temporarily lose the ability to enforce security policies, push updates or ensure compliance on managed laptops.

Cyberattacks

Cybersecurity threats constantly evolve, and cyberattacks are becoming more sophisticated and damaging. Ransomware attacks, data breaches and other cyber incidents can compromise sensitive information and disable IT systems, necessitating robust business continuity measures.

In 2024, ransomware attacks on healthcare surged, with every month surpassing the number of attacks recorded in the same month in 2023. These attacks result in malicious actors encrypting patient data and demanding a hefty ransom for its release.

Such attacks halt operations and jeopardize patient care. Providers need access to critical patient records and systems to avoid severe operational disruptions and reputational damage. This alarming trend underscores the urgent need for organizations to adopt robust solutions such as secure browsers, particularly in critical sectors like healthcare.

Secure browsers help ensure business continuity even during a ransomware attack by providing controlled, secure access to sensitive systems and data. This minimizes downtime and safeguards essential operations.

These scenarios are among many available that illustrate the need for robust business continuity measures to protect against and swiftly recover from such cyberthreats.

Unlock Your Browser to Help Ensure Endpoint-Based Secure Connectivity

Palo Alto Networks has developed a comprehensive, five-stage approach with Prisma® SASE that balances the urgency of addressing emerging threats with the importance of maintaining uptime. This approach delivers strong attack prevention, reduces operational risks, and allows customers to decide how and when to apply updates.

This five-stage approach includes infrastructure resiliency, controlled upgrades management, monitoring and proactive remediation, deployment guidelines for resilience, and endpoint-based secure connectivity with Prisma Access Browser.

Prisma Access Browser enables secure work from any device and location, even unmanaged devices, allowing employees to access critical systems and data without exposing the organization to risk. Many organizations block access to corporate resources from unmanaged devices due to security concerns, leaving them helpless in an IT outage. With Prisma Access Browser, you can now:

1. Enable access to business applications from any device without compromising security. It is key that employees can continue to work despite the disruption. A secure browser allows workers to access corporate applications, including internal applications, from unmanaged devices anywhere in the world. As long as they have a device, your employees can quickly recover.
2. Get back to business in minutes. There’s no time to waste when you’re trying to keep your business running. Prisma Access Browser allows you to use it as your main workspace in one click, and you can easily configure application access per user.
3. Remain compliant and secure. The last thing you need during a crisis is more risk. Cybercriminals often exploit major events like the pandemic, international conflicts and other major IT outages opportunistically, exploiting the spectacle to defraud confused employees and other innocent people. Prisma Access Browser lets you maintain secure business operations, allowing complete control over activity in the browser and running continuous posture checks. With highly granular access, data and identity controls, you can define the exact configuration required to maintain business operations and gain unprecedented visibility into event logs, session recording and more. Prisma Access Browser also includes advanced security controls to help you remain compliant, prevent data leakage, encrypt sensitive files, scan files upon download and upload and more.
4. Frictionless adoption for all your employees. With employees spending 85-100% of their day in a browser, Prisma Access Browser provides a familiar and secure workspace. When managed endpoints are down, workers can simply open their personal devices and continue critical tasks in the secure browser—whether it's responding to production changes, communicating with customers, accessing sensitive data or managing remote machines and servers—ensuring uninterrupted business operations without the delay of waiting for systems to return to operation.

Prisma Access Browser Provides the Necessary Safety Net to Operate Business as Usual

The ability to rapidly deploy Prisma Access Browser enables organizations to securely operate from any device in minutes, ensuring that businesses can quickly adapt to any situation and maintain productivity without significant delays.

For example, insurance providers require a fast way to deploy secure access to corporate applications from disaster areas where people need to gain access quickly. Prisma Access Browser enables them to easily bring on contract workers in the disaster area and enable their access by deploying the browser on the field agent's computer in minutes. Once the operation ends, they can quickly and securely off-board contractors without leaving sensitive data behind.

Prisma Access Browser Keeps Businesses Operating in Times of Crisis

With enhanced security features that protect against cyberthreats—including access, data and identity controls—Prisma Access Browser ensures that business operations remain secure and uninterrupted. It can meet the needs of all organizations, ensuring robust business continuity regardless of your company size.

Prisma Access Browser provides an unparalleled solution to ensure business continuity. It enables secure and efficient operations from any device, anywhere in the world. Schedule a demo to experience the power of Prisma Access Browser for yourself.