What is Cyber Resilience?
It is the ability to prepare for, respond to, and recover from cyberattacks and data breaches, all while continuing to operate effectively. An organization is cyber resilient when it can fight cyber threats, gain adequate cybersecurity risk management, and guarantee business continuity (BC) during and after the incident.
Cyber resilience and attack surface management have been popularized over the past few years, as traditional security methods are no longer effective. The objective of cyber resilience is to maintain the ability to deliver goods and services at all times, even when a breach or attack is occurring. This includes the ability to restore regular mechanisms back to normal in the shortest possible time, with minimal disruption. The process also involves continuous changes and modifications to existing mechanisms, during and after a crisis or breach.
The Importance of Cyber Resilience
The main goal of cyber resilience is to continue operations and processes, irrespective of disruptive events, and demonstrate reliability, productivity, and un-affected efficiency. Organizations that rely on technology need to invest efficiently and effectively in developing and achieving cyber resilience, to make them secure and immune from any disturbance or turbulent event. Leaving this un-addressed can jeopardize the employee experience (EX), and also negatively impact customer loyalty, satisfaction and business growth as well.
The Components of Cyber Resilience
The idea of cyber resilience is to allow organizations to function safely and continuously through digital transformation. Several key ingredients ensure that businesses adapt themselves to refine and strengthen their cyber resilience.
The following list explores the main components of cyber resilience.
Manage and Protect
This involves developing the ability to identify, assess, and manage cyber risks associated with network and information systems, including the potential risks originating from third-party vendors.
Identify and Detect
This involves the use of continuous security monitoring and attack surface management to detect anomalies, potential data breaches and data leaks, before any significant damage can take place.
Respond and Recover
This involves implementing adequate incident response planning to ensure business continuity (BC), even if the organization is contending with a cyberattack.
Govern and Assure
This is the final component that ensures the cyber resilience program is being monitored, and encompassing every domain of the organization. Cyber resilience needs to be treated as part of the core business priorities.
How does Cyber Resilience work?
There are several aspects to how businesses can achieve cyber resilience, and how they can integrate it within the organization. National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) published a report that outlines the improvements needed for effective cyber resilience.
The following areas are the main steps towards effective cyber resilience.
- Being ready for any attack means knowing the risks and threats that are associated with it. This means that the organization needs to recognize where it is lacking, and where the gaps exist.
- The next key is responding effectively to the incident when it occurs. Organizations need to implement efficient processes which can contain the damage, and mitigate the possibility of such an event happening again.
- Recovering from the attack is the next step toward cyber resiliency. The organization needs to procure adequate backup mechanisms to continue working amidst disruption. The recovery system needs to be checked and updated regularly to ensure that it is operative in the hour of need.
- Adopting the changes that come with technology evolution and transformation is an important aspect of improving the way cyber resiliency works in organizations. Constant changes in terms of operations and processes will keep the enterprise aligned with the latest industry trends.
Benefits of Cyber Resilience
Cyber resilience is all about business continuity (BC), along with managing the attack that has occurred. It ensures the operations of the organization are un-interrupted, regardless of the problems surrounding it.
The multiple benefits associated with Cyber Resilience include:-
Enhanced Security Systems
Cyber resilience not only helps with responding to and surviving an attack, it also helps with developing strategies to improve IT governance, boost safety and security across critical IT assets.
Reduced Financial Fallout
Regardless of how good the security is, the fact is, no one is immune to cyber attacks or misconfigurations. The average cost of a data breach is now US $3.92 million globally. In addition to financial costs, the reputational impact of data breaches is also increasing, due to the introduction of strict regulations. With strong implementation of cyber resilience, organizations can avoid the chances of a breach.
Regulatory Compliance
For many industries, cyber resilience is a legal requirement. A lot of organizations are dealing with sensitive information, which can damage or jeopardize the business if leaked. With cyber resilience, organizations can develop regulatory and legal frameworks that are implemented throughout the organization. This way, the organization ensures strong compliance.
Improved Work Culture
Cyber resilience is a team sport. Every employee has a role to play in protecting the organization and its sensitive data, while ensuring adequate incident response. When people are empowered to take security seriously, sensitive data and physical assets are at far lesser risk. Cyber resilience improves work ethics, and builds strong relationships across the entire organization. Having a team to rely on, when there is an attack or a disturbance, builds a work culture that is dedicated and effective.
Reputational Protection
Lack of cyber resilience can irreversibly damage an organization’s reputation. For every organization, maintaining brand loyalty is essential. This is an area where cyber resilience truly shines, as organizations are able to provide services and continue operations irrespective of circumstances. This enables customers and vendors to trust the organization, ensuring that the reputation is well protected.
Trust and Reliability
A lot of emphasis has been placed on vendor risk management and third-party risk management frameworks over the last decade. However, trust is a two-way street. The organization must have cyber resilience strategies in place, before asking vendors to do the same. If the organization itself has ineffective cyber resilience, it can damage its reputation with the customers and vendors.
Better IT Team
One of the underemphasized benefits of cyber resilience is that it improves the daily operations of IT departments. An organization with a hands-on IT team not only improves the ability to respond to threats, but also helps to ensure day-to-day operations are running smoothly.
How to Improve Cyber Resilience?
There are multiple ways of improving cyber resilience. IT experts have provided frameworks to engineer secure and reliable systems that treat cyber events with resilience.
- Analytic Monitoring:- Monitor and track adverse actions and conditions in a timely and actionable manner.
- Coordinated Protection:- Implement an in-depth strategy, so attackers have to overcome multiple obstacles.
- Deception:- Mislead, confuse and hide critical IT assets from cyber miscreants.
- Diversity:- Use heterogeneity to minimize common mode.
- Dynamic Recovery:- Increase the ability to rapidly recover from a non-adversarial incident, by distributing and diversifying the network.
- Privilege Restriction:- Restrict privileges, based on attributes of users and system elements, as well as on environmental factors.
- Realignment:- Minimize the connections between mission-critical and non-critical services to reduce the likelihood that a failure of non-critical services will impact mission-critical services.
- Segmentation:- Divide organizational processes in separate elements, based on criticality and trustworthiness.
- Unpredictability:- Make changes randomly and unexpectedly. This increases an adversary’s uncertainty regarding system protection.
The Pivotal Role of Leadership in Cyber Resilience
In every aspect of the organization, it is important to develop leadership skills to manage and contain situations when they occur. In the case of cyber resilience, activated leaders can transform the organization’s approach across the board by championing security as a cultural value.
Organizations can feel more secure when leadership enables influence and novel security methods. When a strong leader establishes an organization wide code of conduct regarding security, it is evident that cyber resilience becomes a critical priority.
Future of implementing Cyber Resilience
ATSG can monitor your organization with multiple intelligent cybersecurity solutions that can overcome a wide range of cyber threats. ATSG offers class leading solutions to achieve cyber resilience across the entire organization with ease.
The following solutions offered by ATSG can help organizations achieve business continuity (BC) along with cyber resilience.
Advisory and Assessment Services
ATSG offers certified cyber security experts that manage the organization’s infrastructure, and also provides analysts to identify any loopholes within your enterprise cybersecurity posture. Our solutions also collect and track incidents in real-time to get the organization back up and running in the event of a cyber incident.
Managed Detection and Response (MDR)
ATSG’s managed security services provide support across a wide range of technology solutions, architectures, policies, procedures, and capabilities. As the threat landscape continues to evolve, having access to real-time threat monitoring of security events inside the network is crucial. A combination of security expertise and the latest threat intelligent tools across all environments can help comb through a wide range of cyber threats.
End-point Detection and Response (EDR)
Similar to Managed Detection and Response, ATSG’s EDR solution combines the best security solutions and expertise with the latest threat intelligence and transparency. This ensures the safety of end-users and end-points of the organization, which are often most vulnerable to attacks and security breaches. In this era, protecting endpoints through EDR solutions is critical.
Vulnerability Management
ATSG comprehends the changing environment of IT-related threats facing businesses today. Using the latest security technologies, threat intelligence, and operational knowledge, ATSG delivers comprehensive coverage, visibility, risk-based assessment, and remediation of key vulnerabilities.
Contact Us for cutting edge cybersecurity solutions, which can take your cyber resilience posture to a whole new level.
