Developing a Strong Cyber Resilience Program for Your Business

Last Updated: 

March 6, 2024

The pandemic has made it an especially difficult time for businesses all over the world. It is crucial for businesses to learn how to be resilient against various challenges. What made things worse was the increasing types and instances of cyber attacks targeting businesses, especially as the pandemic compelled businesses to move online, increasing digital communications, and unfortunately, cyber risks. Reports show that from February to May 2020, more than half a million people were affected by breaches.

In light of this, let’s look at how businesses can build a strong cybersecurity and cyber-resilience program.

Key Takeaways on Building a Strong Cyber Resillience Program:

  1. Cybersecurity and Cyber-resilience: The pandemic has increased the digital presence of businesses, and in turn, cyber threats. While cybersecurity involves taking steps to prevent cyberattacks, cyber-resilience goes one step further. It is about the ability of an organisation to continue its operations despite a successful breach.
  2. Five Steps to Develop a Strong Cyber-resilience Program:
  3. Preparation: Adopt a tiered security approach involving people, processes, and technology to prepare for potential cyber threats.
  4. Protection: This includes employing sophisticated cybersecurity applications and educating employees about best practices, such as BYOD policies and using VPNs.
  5. Absorption: This step tests the durability of systems and their ability to keep running during an attack. A single platform for data and content, using content management and cloud collaboration processes, can be effective.
  6. Recovery: The goal of a cyber-resilience program is to be able to recover from an attack. Effective backup strategies and the ability to restore data to a different drive or network are essential.
  7. Adaptability: Having the latest threat intelligence technologies helps organisations understand and respond to the newest threats, keeping them one step ahead in protecting their systems.

The article emphasises the need for businesses to not only implement cybersecurity measures but also develop a cyber-resilience program to remain operational despite potential breaches.

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Comparing Cybersecurity and Cyber-resilience

Many businesses have learnt from their mistakes and know that cyberattack is a real threat and shouldn’t be taken lightly. You could have thought of purchasing cyber threat prevention services from a cyber security company to lower the risk of cyberattacks. To prevent such attacks, cybersecurity measures are usually implemented at various levels of the organisation in order to prevent this cyberattack. Understanding the technical foundations, including the differences between an ipv4 and ipv6 address, is crucial for implementing effective cybersecurity measures. A bitter pill these organisations have to swallow is the fact that there is every possibility for these cybersecurity measures to fail. This is where cyber-resilience comes in.

Cyber-resilience is the ability for an organisation to continue its operations unhindered even after there has been a successful breach on its systems. Most of these breaches including dedicated denial-of-service (DDoS), man-in-the-middle attacks, and data theft are often perpetrated using viruses, malware, Trojans, worms, ransomware, etc.

5 Steps for Developing a Strong Cyber-Resilience Program

Over time, there have been several programs proposed to be driven at achieving a stellar cyber-resilience program. The following however shows how a step-by-step model by which cybersecurity can be used to build a strong cyber-resilience program:

1. Preparation

Prevention they say, is better than cure, and the same is applicable in this case. Preparing for the inevitable through tiered security approach using people, processes and technology is the first step towards achieving a strong cyber-resilience program.

2. Protection

The product step of cyber-resilience programs involves cybersecurity processes. Solutions involving sophisticated applications that work on endpoint detection and recovery, DNS protection, data protection layers and security awareness training are also necessary for advanced cyber-resilience levels. This also includes employee education on BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policies, ensuring staff use a VPN as an encryption tool, and so on.

3. Absorption

This is perhaps the most important stage of the cyber-resilience program. Here, the durability of systems is often tested and the ability for an organisation to keep its systems running goes a long way to determine if they pass the test or not. Oftentimes, a single platform for data and content is adopted – utilising content management and cloud collaboration processes so data can be isolated in the event of an attack while other systems keep running.

4. Recovery

The ultimate goal of a cyber-resilience program is the ability to recover from an attack. Effective, granular and reliable backup and subsequent recovery to a different drive or network will enable timeless restoration of data in the event of an attack.

5. Adaptability

Up-to-the-minute threat intelligence technologies embedded into a Network Security Operations Centre allow system administrators to understand the latest threats and how to act upon them. This factor enables organisations to stay one step ahead in protecting their systems from possible attacks.

Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay

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