What is Cyber Resilience & Why Do You Want It?
In today’s digital age, cyber attacks are inevitable. No matter what size your business, or the sector you operate in, you will face a cybersecurity incident at some point or another. When this happens, your level of cyber resilience will determine how quickly you are able to bounce back from the event, maintain operations and uphold data security.
Not sure what cyber resilience means, or how resilient your organization is? We’ll demystify everything below.
What Is Cyber Resilience?
Cyber resilience is a term that encompasses an organization’s business continuity, data security and overall operational resilience. In essence, it refers to an organization’s resilience in the event of a cybersecurity incident, such as a ransomware attack, phishing attack or data loss event.
An organization’s level of cyber resilience, based on information security capabilities and cybersecurity strategy, determines how well an organization is able to bounce back from such an incident without detrimental consequences such as down time or data theft.
Why Is Cyber Resilience Important To Businesses?
While cyber resilience is intangible in many ways in the sense that it can’t be measured, it is still wise for all organizations to improve their cyber resilience. Doing so has numerous benefits, as we’ll explore below.
Avoiding Financial Loss
Financial loss is one of the most terrifying consequences of a successful cyber attack. IBM research shows that the average data breach costs a huge $4.2 million for large organizations. This is due to numerous factors, including compliance fines, downtime, loss of customer trust, stakeholder issues and so forth that all result after a cybersecurity incident. By improving cyber resilience, organizations can mitigate the chances of such consequences.
Improving Relationships with Customers, Suppliers and Stakeholders
In the same way that a cyber-attack can negatively impact your relationships with customers, suppliers and stakeholders, cyber resilience can have the opposite effect. For example, many government organizations mandate that their suppliers gain accreditations such as ISO/IEC 27001 provided from the International Organization for Standardization. This is the standard for an information security management system.
How To Get Started With Improving Your Company’s Cyber Resilience
A great cyber resilience strategy is holistic and risk-based. You’ll need to take a company-wide approach, championing cybersecurity from the top-down, and extending your strategy to take into account supply chain partners, customers, IT vendors and other third parties.
The overall idea of a cyber resilience strategy is to proactively identify and manage potential risks to your organization’s sensitive data and IT infrastructure.
In practice, this takes the form of a five stage life cycle, as defined by the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) service. The steps are: strategy, design, transition, operation and improvement.
- Cyber resilience design involves choosing an information security management system that fits your organization’s needs. You’ll need to consider whether the controls within the system are applicable and reasonable, whether you’ll be able to follow the procedures associated with the system, and how to implement training.
- Cyber resilience transition is the process of implementing the chosen system on a pilot basis, testing different controls and remediation tactics to ensure that everything works as it should be. This step is also about discovering the sensitive data within your organization that is most vulnerable to compromise or loss, and putting in place controls to mitigate these risks.
- Cyber resilience operation is the in-action phase of your management system, where you put all the work so far into practice, with a focus on detecting and managing potential incidents as they arise. When an incident does occur, the team must review what happened, what worked well and what could’ve been done better, and then feed this back into the strategy of the management system with an eye to continuous improvement.
- Cyber resilience evolution is the ongoing learning, improving and modification of the management system to ensure it is as good as it can be.
What If I Don’t Have A Security Or IT Team?
Achieving cyber resilience without an internal security or IT team is one of the biggest challenges SMBs face. Even for those organizations with internal members of IT staff, undertaking the rollout of an information security management system is a huge undertaking that may feel impossible.
That’s why many SMBs turn to managed IT providers like us. A great managed IT provider can take on the responsibility of improving cyber resilience for you, implementing an information security management system along with layered security solutions to ensure your organization is protected from cyber attacks and data loss from every angle.
Let Us Help You Become More Cyber Resilient!
Improving cyber resilience is something we know how to do. Each part of your IT infrastructure must be framed with a cybersecurity posture to give you an advantage against threats and reduce the risk of suffering costly downtime. We will evaluate your current setup, and let you know of vulnerable areas and how we can help you address those. Contact us for your free consultation today!
