What Does It Mean to Be Cyber Resilient
You’ve probably heard of business resilience and continuity planning. But have you heard of cyber resilience? Below, we’ll explain everything there is to know about this up and coming term, and give you actionable advice on how to improve your organization’s cyber resilience. 

Let’s get started!

What Is Cyber Resilience? 

Cyber resilience is a relatively new phrase that is being used in the cybersecurity community and businesses alike. In essence, it links to an organization’s ability to maintain IT security and react to cyber attacks and IT complications, such as natural disasters, with as little downtime as possible. 

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) explains Cyber Resiliency in further detail, defining it as: “The ability to anticipate, withstand, recover from, and adapt to adverse conditions, stresses, attacks, or compromises on systems that use or are enabled by cyber resources.”

In practice, this means creating technology infrastructure that is robust, secure and agile. 

Why Is Cyber Resilience Important? 

Cyber resilience is vital to maintaining organizational competitiveness. These days, cyber attacks are a case of when, not if. Don’t think that attackers won’t target your company. 56% of all attacks in Canada are targeted at small businesses. With odds like that, cybersecurity must be a strategic priority within your business. 

When you are impacted by a cyber security incident, your ability to maintain uptime, preserve data security and ensure compliance will be vital to your organizations’ short term and long term success. 

What Does Cyber Resilience Look Like In Practice? 

Cyber resilience might sound abstract, but it’s something you can easily weave into your current cybersecurity posture. You don’t need to start from scratch and overhaul everything you’ve put in place so far. Cyber resilience is about building upon your foundations and making improvements so that you can be more agile in the event of a cyber attack or unforeseen security incident. 

With that in mind, here are some of the critical elements that make an organization cyber resilient. 

Harness The Power Of Automation 

Automation is taking the business world by storm. It’s used for everything from customer service to making invoice processing more efficient. It can also help you to be more cyber resilient. Using automation solutions like user behavior analytics and monitoring and logging, you can more easily detect security threats within your IT infrastructure, and mitigate them with speed. Automation is undoubtedly much faster than a person manually reviewing event logs, which could take weeks compared to just seconds with an automated tool.  

Train Your Employees

Your people are your first line of defense in the fight against cyber attacks. Phishing emails, for example, originate from human error, when an unwitting employee inadvertently clicks on a phishing email. 

By training your employees to spot these threats, you can avoid a whole range of attacks. It’s also wise to put in place a system that empowers your employees to report suspected phishing attacks, so you can warn the rest of your organization about these threats. 

Enable Data Loss Protection 

Data loss protection is a collection of solutions that work to identify, secure and redact sensitive data, protecting it from potential leakage and theft. These tools are super important for cyber resilience, helping you to meet compliance mandates like HIPAA, GDPR and GBLA. 

Backup Your Data

Some cyber attacks are all about causing as much disruption as possible. Ransomware, for example, locks you out of your systems, requesting you to pay a ransom to get back in – or lose your data forever.

The best way to fight this threat and boost cyber resilience is to back up sensitive data regularly by using cloud storage solutions. As well as implementing a backup solution, you’ll also need to test it frequently to make sure it’s working as expected, and backing up all your critical data. 

Design and Rehearse an Incident Response Plan

An incident response plan is your how-to manual for responding to a cyber incident. A great incident response plan will include step-by-step guidance for responding to different types of attacks, the names and responsibilities of people involved in the process, communications plans, escalation criteria and more. 

Having an incident response plan alone isn’t enough. You need to rehearse it regularly to make sure that everyone understands the plan and their roles within it. Don’t just do this once either; we advise rehearsing your incident response plan at least every three to four months, or whenever you make notable changes to your IT infrastructure. 

Get Support Improving Your Company’s Cyber Resiliency

Improving cyber resilience isn’t always easy, but it’s undoubtedly worth it if you want to avoid cyber attacks and maintain business competitiveness. Not sure where to start? That’s where we come in.

Our cyber security experts are on hand to help you become more cyber resilient. Why not get started with a free Cybersecurity Assessment to see  how you’re doing with your IT security?

 

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