Cyber Resilience: The 6 Steps Towards Resilience
Business and security experts have or are slowly realizing that it’s not a matter of “if,” but of “when” you will be breached or attacked. In light of this, a solution that enabled enterprises to continue functioning despite being breached or attacked was deemed necessary.
That’s where Cyber Resilience comes into play.
What is Cyber Resilience?
Cyber Resilience refers to a system’s ability to resume operations even when under attack. It is a form of security that enables you to adapt to an ever-changing cyberspace while anticipating, withstanding, and overcoming adverse conditions.
This form of cybersecurity has become an essential part of determining enterprise success. Attackers continuously evolve and if you don’t keep up or adapt to their tactics, you will fall victim sooner or later. You need Cyber Resilience to effectively circumvent cybercrimes while remaining functional.
Cyber Resilience enables business continuity, helps you defend against cyberthreats, and mitigates the risk of a threat.
Cybersecurity vs Cyber Resilience
Cybersecurity enforces a system’s attack surface (attack angles a cybercriminal can exploit) to prohibit attackers from compromising your network, data, and IT infrastructure. Cybersecurity refers to an organization’s efforts to prevent bad actors from gaining access to their data.
Notably, cybersecurity is inextricable from your security strategy and tactics. However, attackers are crafty and always find ways to break through your defenses.
Cyber Resilience assumes that you will be breached and devises policies, solutions, and architectures by defining the steps that should be taken when cybersecurity fails.
So, while cybersecurity’s main focus is on avoiding a breach at all costs. Cyber Resilience focuses on mitigating and controlling the breach by maintaining business operations without unwanted interruptions.
The Steps Towards Cyber Resilience
A typical Cyber Resilience Framework must implement the following framework:
- Identify: This is the primary component of a Cyber Resilience program and essential to understanding your network, infrastructure, and data vulnerabilities. You first need to identify core business functions/assets and then identify the threats that can hamper them.
- Protect: After the identification step is complete, now you need to integrate protective measures against the identified threats such as training, security policies, identity management and access control, and regular IT infrastructure maintenance.
- Detect: In this step, your whole system will be scanned to locate suspicious activities and identify the potential damages they might cause. A continuous monitoring system is set up to analyze unusual activity that might compromise sensitive data or systems.
- Respond: The aim of this step is to mitigate and control the negative effects of an attack.
- Recover: This function is crucial to minimizing the damage done to core business functions if any damage was suffered in the first place. This step includes restoring system, data, or application functionality in the event of an attack.
- Adapt: To remain Cyber Resilient you need to implement continuous improvements on your existing program. You can utilize contemporary AI-assisted analytics that extracts detailed cyberattack reports. After analyzing your security posture, you need to remediate the detected vulnerabilities.
The Benefits Of Cyber Resilience
An airtight Cyber Resilience will offer various benefits pre, post, and during malicious attacks including:
Minimal Financial Impact: Cyber Resilience enables a prepared and well-thought-out response towards cyber-attacks that reduces downtime substantially and accelerates disaster recovery.
Compliance: Since the amount of mission-critical and sensitive data businesses hold and control every day is growing, remaining compliant with the various regulations is becoming increasingly complex. A Cyber Resilient organization will have an adaptive nature, enabling you to identify and remediate loopholes and vulnerabilities that might lead to compliance issues.
Brand Protection: A catastrophic cyber incident will hamper and damage the image of your brand. Having a Cyber Resilience program in place will increase your overall security and convey a brand image that your customers can trust.
Business Continuity: As said throughout this article, Cyber Resilience mitigates and helps eliminate threats before they even occur. Having such measures in place will ensure that your business will continue running no matter what.
The Covid pandemic has not deterred attackers in the least, in fact, cyber-attacks are seeing an all-time high. Having the latest cyber measures in place is becoming more important than ever and Cyber Resilience is a safe step towards there.
We (HybridValley) are a battle-tested cybersecurity company and resilience is one of our specialties. So, if cybersecurity is of concern, reach out to us and we will keep you secure.