Businesses often face cyber threats. Cybercriminals often target a company’s data so they can steal sensitive information and use it to turn a profit. Other times, they may try to render a business incapable of operating normally. Either way, businesses need strong cyber resilience and cyber security to weather the storm of threats that they face.
In some ways, cyber resilience may be more important for a business than cybersecurity alone.
What is cyber resilience? How is it related to (but different from) cybersecurity? What are the benefits of having a strong cyber resilience framework? Most importantly, how can you create strong cyber resilience to protect your business?
Cyber resilience is a term for an organization’s ability to keep important applications, systems, data, and digital services online in the face of various cyber threats, system failures, and other unplanned events.
According to antivirus provider Webroot, cyber resilience “can be thought of as digital fitness.” A digitally-fit and resilient company has a better chance of weathering IT incidents that would normally result in service outages than a company that isn’t.
While there is significant overlap between cyber resilience and cybersecurity, they aren’t quite the same thing. Cybersecurity policies, tools, and procedures can play an important role in cyber resilience.
As noted by UpGuard, “An organization is cyber resilient when they can defend against cyber threats, have adequate cybersecurity risk management, and can guarantee business continuity during and after cyber incidents.” This close relation and the use of security tools for ensuring resilience may explain why the two terms are often conflated with one another.
So, what is the distinction?
Where cybersecurity is primarily concerned with preventing or remediating cyber threats to protect a company’s IT systems and data from abuse, cyber resilience focuses a bit more on minimizing the impacts of unexpected IT incidents on the business. In other words, cyber resilience is more about business continuity while cybersecurity is about mitigating cyber risks.
Some of the biggest threats to an organization’s resiliency for its IT systems include:
Why would a business invest significant capital, time, and resources into improving its cyber resilience? There are a few reasons that doing so is worthwhile:
Strong cyber resilience can help a company improve its business resilience. By proactively acquiring solutions to minimize the risk of IT service outages, companies can avoid the high cost of downtime.
How much does IT network downtime cost? While the actual numbers can vary depending on the nature of the outage and the company, estimates from organizations like Gartner state that the cost of network downtime is around $5,600 per minute, or over $300k per hour.
Using business resilience-improving solutions like remote data backups or secondary production environments can cut the time it takes to recover from a cyber incident down from hours to mere minutes. If a service outage would normally last for a full 24 hours, but only lasts one hour with a remote data backup, then the company would save roughly $7,728,000.
Cyber resilience can be key for improving IT risk management. By proactively identifying potential vulnerabilities that could impact IT solution stability, organizations can reduce the risk of IT failures.
Companies with strong cyber resilience and integrated risk management solutions are more likely to have a high uptime/availability for their services than companies without high resilience.
Higher service uptime translates into an overall better user experience, which can help with customer retention and adoption of key IT services by both internal and external users.
So, how can you create strong cyber resiliency for your own organization? There are four critical pillars for strong cyber resilience:
Cybersecurity is a critical component of effective cyber resilience strategies. So, it should be no surprise that being able to manage and protect IT systems is key for ensuring resiliency.
Specifically, it’s important to ensure that only authorized users can access important systems and data—which often calls for user authentication solutions (like multi-factor authentication) and access control solutions.
Additionally, it’s important to keep a list of all the assets on the IT network and check them for vulnerabilities and single points of failure so they can be addressed properly.
If there’s a problem on the network, such as an active cyberattack, and you don’t have a way to detect it, that can be a serious gap in your cyber resilience strategy. Aside from malicious threats, servers or other assets on the network may experience slowdowns or failures because of regular wear and tear.
So, having a solution for detecting anomalous activity or sub-optimal performance on the network can be crucial for ensuring cyber resilience. With a strong detection solution, it’s possible to identify problems quickly and take steps to remediate them before they can negatively impact the business.
Does the organization have an incident response plan ready to go? Does it account for what every team member should do during a service outage or other emergency? Having a plan in place to speed along the organization’s recovery can be critical for minimizing the duration of a service outage and increasing cyber resiliency.
Who is in charge of managing the organization’s resilience strategy? What policies and tools are in place to ensure that the company’s resilience strategy can be acted on?
Governance is crucial for any long-term, large-scale initiative. So, assigning roles and responsibilities to ensure top-down oversight and adherence to the different components of the cyber resilience strategy (data backups, business continuity plan, incident response plan, etc.) is vital for maximizing resiliency.
Part of implementing a successful cyber resilience strategy calls for addressing the four pillars of resiliency outlined above. Some more specific measures that a business might need to take include:
These are just a few of the measures needed to ensure a successful cyber resilience strategy that can help your company protect itself from IT incidents. If you need more help with building cyber-resilient business processes, reach out to the Contender Solutions team!