The difference between resilience and security is essential to business continuity, and both aim to keep their system elements and critical services operational in the face of a threat, whether it be a cyberattack, a network security breach, or even a physical attack.
On the other hand, its resilience to cyber-attacks that help businesses to get back on track in the event of a disruption and to improve their risk management system to handle future disruptions.
Although cyber resilience and cybersecurity are interrelated, the ultimate goal of cyber resilience is to keep the business going in an environment where advanced and persistent threats are constantly maturing and evolving. Cyber resilience strategies require a culture shift, with organizations embracing security awareness training as a full-time job and incorporating best practices in cyber resilience into their day-to-day operations.
Organizations need to execute the most efficient cyber resilience strategy to prevent attacks. It should be clear by now that cybersecurity and cyber resilience are different but symbiotic. Companies often treat them as separate but interconnected solutions, often forming their own cybersecurity and cyber resilience teams and systems.
Cyber resilience is a unified approach that combines cybersecurity with data protection and disaster recovery methods designed to protect against and recover quickly from disruptive cyber incidents. To survive and adapt to today’s security issues, businesses need a defense-in-depth solution using new technology and well-defined networking practices.
Cyber resilience is the ability to respond and recover after an attack and can be viewed as an alternative to cybersecurity or even as a substitute for it. While cybersecurity capabilities can protect data breach from a wide range of threats, continued investment in technology and innovation is intended to further enhance these capabilities to improve overall risk management.
Although cybersecurity and cyber resilience are positioned as two separate activities, the reality is more complex. The first step toward cyber resilience is considered cybersecurity, which means that a strategy for cyber resilience must include cybersecurity.
Cyber resilience is rapidly becoming one of the most important aspects of cybersecurity strategy for organizations. Cyber resilience combines the best of both worlds – security and resilience – to enable organizations to continue to operate in the event of adverse cyber events. A security issue or cyber incident can lead to the loss of critical infrastructure, disruption of business operations, or even the collapse of an organization’s infrastructure.
The longer it takes for it to be put back into operation, the greater the impact and the longer the damage to the company.
Cyber resilience strategy refers to the preparations an organization makes to deal with a security failure, such as developing defense systems and raising awareness of the resources available to mitigate security issues in retrospect. It is not built for a particular time, but a continuous effort that is required to recover from a computer system in the event of a cyberattack, even after a major data breach. This can affect all aspects of information technology and security, including data security, data protection, and data management.
To achieve cyber resilience, government agencies & the private sector both need to think differently about how they build and implement their systems. Security needs to be embedded in the architecture of the system based on the ‘Statement of Applicability’. Since everyone is connected to the Internet, cyber activities must focus on protecting secret information, operations, and critical assets from intrusions and cyber risk.
From two decades of directing the enterprise technology function, we have come to realize 2 important facts about information security :
1) There is no such state of ‘Nirvana’ as being 100% secure.
2) The question is not – if you can be hacked? it’s ‘when’ your systems are compromised what are you going to do about it ?
Having had the bad experience of dealing with point 2, we can assure you that dealing with the situation, internal and external stakeholders takes different skillsets of crisis management that you will probably only discover once you are in the situation yourself. So, don’t leave the postmortem reaction to guesswork. Have a cyber resilience plan in place to guide you in taking scripted steps to recover rapidly with the least amount of disruption.
The problem is not that our defenses are being violated, but that we probably already assume that they will be eventually broken. The mission of cybersecurity is to completely avoid injuries and attacks, not knowing when they will happen or how to react when they do.
One strategic approach to cyber resilience and building cyber resilience is to understand vulnerabilities in companies and the cyber risk potential that can be absorbed. Focusing time and investment on strategic responses to cyber breaches and considering the entire company workforce as a security team, can greatly strengthen the cyber resilience of your organization. This approach could increase global investment in cybersecurity, despite the rising cost of endpoint security systems and the ongoing threat of cyber-attacks. Basically, nurturing your employees to become the firewalls, after the human element is the weakest link!
Having the necessary cyber resilience strategies forces companies to recognize what hackers are capable off and what their teams can do to succeed in their efforts in the case of breach information security. This approach helps them to prepare, prevent, and successfully regain access control and security controls. When a cyber-attack is successful and the usability of a system is compromised there is no way to resume operations, the impact on the financials of the company in the situation would be significant. A considerably basic but effective approach is to have a full backup of all your data. A simple but necessary control of Information governance has been ignored ever so often leaving your organization needing to surrender to ‘Ransom’ demands from hackers locking company servers down until they are paid in cryptocurrency (untraceable). Always have a recent updated ‘Backup’ taken!
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If you need a guide to help build a successful recovery strategy, do get in touch with us. We study your operations, help identify possible threats, provide a recommendation for risk treatment, and could also facilitate a threat identification if needed.