CYBER RESILIENCE: Importance of Cyber Resilience

With each new day, cybercrime dangers amplify and evolve. Organizations should make decisions based on how likely it is that their network defenses will fail, and they should come up with a plan to limit the damage if it does. Here is where cyber-resilience comes into play. Cyber resilience is a strategy that helps organizations keep their services running and keep their business going even if they encounter attacks of some sort. In this article, we’ll be discussing all you need to know about the cyber resilience framework and strategy. In other words, we’ll be discussing cyber resilience vs cyber strategy

Let’s dive in right away!

What is Cyber Resilience?

Cyber resilience is the capacity of systems to make use of cyber resources to foresee, endure, recover from, and adapt to challenging circumstances, pressures, attacks, or compromises. Digital fitness can be compared to cyber resilience. It is the capacity to maintain your business, data, and gadgets online despite attacks. It includes end-to-end protection against cyber threats and data loss, going beyond a single defense against a single danger.

Companies can survive an attack with minimal damage if they can complete the three events listed below.

• Adapt to counter cyber threats
• Survive and recover from a crisis
• Be ready for unforeseen events

Cyber Resilience Strategy 

Business continuity planning is a part of the cyber resilience strategy, which covers more than only protecting against data breaches and cyberattacks. Your business will exhibit cyber resilience if the security staff recognizes threats that come from phishing, malware that was unintentionally downloaded, or other sources in the case of a breach.

Things to think about when developing a Cyber Resilience Strategy

#1. An approach based on risk

A cyber resilience program’s foundation is risk management. Cyber resilience controls are better determined when a holistic cyber risk management approach is implemented that recognizes the enterprise strategy and related cyber risk exposure in the ever-changing market environment.

It is impossible to overestimate the importance of aligning your cyber resilience risk management with the company’s business risk environment. To ensure continuity in directing, tracking, and assessing the mitigation of cyber risks across the enterprise, cyber risk governance should be integrated into the current organizational governance structure.

#2. Recovery and Response

Any suspicious activity should be handled as soon as it is discovered. This must be the focal point of an effective cyber resilience strategy. Set up an offline emergency plan to make sure that important business functions like security, finances, quality control, and customer service don’t suffer while the company works to stop the threat. Also, keep a simple incident response plan that lists what needs to be done and by whom in case of a breach.

#3. Business Strategy Alignment

A business strategy provides excellent insight into not only the most important business processes and assets to sustain the organization, but also the extent to which these processes and assets will be vulnerable to cyber disruptions. The cyber resilience strategy must cover the entire product life cycle and assist business operations such as people, suppliers, and capital.

Working with leadership and IT, information security heads must develop a cyber resilience plan that supports a business strategy to protect key assets and processes. The importance of the IT department to the company cannot be overstated.

Cyber Resilience Framework 

The capacity to anticipate, respond to, and recover from a cyber attack is known as cyber resilience. Organizations can use it to lessen the impact of cyberattacks, defend against them, reduce cyber risks, and ensure their pro-survival even in the face of one.

7 Steps to Cyber Resilience Framework

Below are the steps to cyber resilience work 

#1. Spend money on SOAR to accelerate detection and response times.

Security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR), security information and event management (SIEM) software, and managed detection and response and services can all aid in accelerating incident response through automation, process standardization, and integration with current security tools.

By planning for, responding to, and recovering from cyber attacks, a company can enable business acceleration (enterprise resiliency). 

An organization that is cyber-resilient can deal with both known and unknown crises, threats, problems, and setbacks

#2. Adopt zero trust to control access to sensitive data

Only 35% of the firms in a survey have adopted a zero-trust security strategy. The average cost of a breach was $1.76 million lower for firms adopting zero-trust deployments in the mature stage than for those not doing so. 

A zero-trust approach can help protect data and resources by making them accessible only on a limited basis and in the appropriate context, the report observed. 

This is because enterprises have transitioned to incorporating remote work and more disconnected, hybrid, multi-cloud settings.

#3. Stress-test your incident response plan to boost resilience

The following facts speak for themselves: According to the Ponemon study, businesses that had incident response teams and tested their incident response plans saw an average total cost of a data breach that was $2.46 million lower than those that didn’t.

#4. Use tools to protect and monitor endpoints, remote employees

According to the report, unified endpoint management and identity and access management products and services can assist in giving security teams deeper visibility into questionable activity on company-owned and BYOD laptops, desktops, tablets, mobile devices, and IoT devices, including endpoints the organization doesn’t have physical access to. 

This will speed up the time it takes to look into a breach and figure out how to stop it and limit the damage.

#5. Invest in governance, risk management, and compliance

The paper explained that having an internal framework for audits, assessing risk throughout the company, and monitoring compliance with governance rules can assist an organization in better able to recognize a data breach and stepping up containment efforts.

#6. Embrace open security architectures and minimize complexity

The survey observed that security teams may identify events across complex, hybrid, multi-cloud settings with the aid of security solutions that can communicate data between separate systems.

Incorporated solutions and services from a managed security services provider can also help to simplify security and risk, it was said.

#7. Protect sensitive data in the cloud with policy and encryption

The research suggested utilizing data classification schema and retention programs to help increase visibility into and decrease the volume of sensitive information that is susceptible to a compromise, and to safeguard it using data encryption and fully homomorphic encryption. 

In addition, it recommended using red teams, penetration testing, and vulnerability scanning to find vulnerabilities and misconfigurations in cloud-hosted databases.

How Does Cyber Resilience Work?

The five areas of focus of cyber resilience for SMEs and mid-markets are:

• Identify – Understand your environment and overall cyber risk
• Protect– Implement appropriate safeguards to contain a cyber security event
• Detect– Maintain visibility into your network so you can detect intrusions
• Respond – Assume a breach will happen and have a plan in place
• Recover – Business interruption is the greatest risk; access experts to recover quickly

Critical Components of Cyber Security 

Cyber-resilience strategy  includes three key components: 

#1. Isolation

Air gaps or logical safeguards intended to prevent backup sets from being rewritten can be used for isolation. Data is conceptually and physically separated from the rest of the network using the air gaps technique. 

Backing up to a removable hard drive and then putting the disk away in a safe is one straightforward illustration of an air gap.

#2. Orchestration

Ransomware and other dangerous software are made to spread quickly before quickly encrypting important data. Companies must employ monitoring and analytics across systems to swiftly spot malicious behavior due to the rapidity of such attacks.

Even though malware moves much faster than a person, the first response to an attack is often well-known. 

Automation is the most effective way to deal with hazards as they arise. Using signals from monitoring systems as triggers, incident response orchestration automates the actions that need to be taken to stop the danger and lessen its effects.

#3. Rapid recovery

The third essential element of cyber resilience is quick recovery. As previously stated, IT systems are crucial to company success. However, there are some instances in which downtime of IT systems, such as in healthcare and critical infrastructure, could result in loss of life. 

Every firm will have downtime occasionally, thus solutions should be set up to restore system or data availability as needed to meet business needs.

Rapid recovery systems are helpful because they allow recovery and investigation to happen at the same time. Rapid recovery solutions may need to be remapped to the recovery location when rapid recovery solutions mount snapshots of the damaged data.

Why Do We Need Cyber Resilience?

We need cyber resilience because standard security measures are insufficient to guarantee proper information security, data security, and network security, cyber resilience is crucial. 

Also, many CISOs and IT security teams believe that attackers will eventually get illegal access to their organizations, and they need to prevent this. 

How Do You Build Cyber Resilience?

You can improve cyber resilience in five easy steps. Let’s take a look at them. 

#1. Secure remote working enablement:

Secure remote working should safeguard partners, employees, systems, and confidential company data. 

Recent large-scale infrastructure deployments make this the ideal opportunity to reduce the hazards of rapid adoption.

#2. Develop a comprehensive response plan: 

Getting professional help while creating your Business Continuity Plan (BCP) and developing team reaction capability is a crucial step in achieving cyber resilience.

#3. Build a cyber security improvement roadmap: 

Continuous innovation and flexibility are essential to cyber resiliency. Thus, risk reduction depends on maintaining and upgrading a cyber security improvement program.

#4. Build detection and response capability: 

Active identification of harmful signals and the capacity to react decisively to a cyber crisis are essential for protecting digital assets.

#5. Educating users on escalating threats: 

Key personnel is the focus of current cyber threats, including phishing and company email breaches, which cause more business disruption, financial loss, and reputational damage. Teach your staff how to handle new threats.

Cyber resilience Vs Cyber Strategy 

Let’s consider the difference between cyber resilience and cyber strategy.

Cyber resilience: Cyber resilience is the capacity of an entity to consistently produce the desired result in the face of cyberattacks.

Cyber strategy: This is simply an action plan for enhancing the security and resilience of national infrastructures and services.

Conclusion 

By making it easier for security executives to think, you might stop hackers from getting into your network through the main door. The more rights an account has, the more useful it is to you and, unfortunately, to hackers who try to break into your IT system. 

The best way for an attacker to get into a company’s network is still through privileged account credentials. Attackers can get into your system through an account that isn’t well managed and move through several servers without being caught. 

When IT administrators don’t know what staff is doing with their rights, hostile insiders can abuse their positions without anyone noticing. So, make sure that only authorized people, processes, and devices can get to your physical and logical assets and the facilities that go with them.  

Did you find this article useful? If yes, please share. 

Related Posts

1. RISK RETENTION: Definition and Best Strategies
2. What Is Differentiation Strategy? Examples and Benefits
3. FORENSIC AUDIT: Meaning & Uses of Forensic Audit Report

FAQs On Cyber Resilience

Why is Cyber resilience important?

Cyber resilience is crucial since standard security measures are insufficient to provide proper information security, data security, and network security. In reality, many CISOs and IT security teams increasingly presume that ultimately, attackers will acquire illegal access to their firm.

How can I be Cyber resilient?

Aligning information security, business continuity, and organizational adaptability are characteristics of cyber resilience. Protecting the enterprise from anything that could compromise the availability, of IT systems, and their corresponding data and services.

What is the difference between cybersecurity and cyber resilkence?

A cybersecurity strategy can help prevent a data breach or reduce the risk of malicious activity. A cyber resilience strategy, on the other hand, helps mitigate the effects of these attacks.