Concepts and terms of Cyber Resilience
• What is Cyber Resilience?
• Why cyber resilience is important
• What is effective cyber resilience?
• The benefits of cyber resilience
• The Related Terms of Cyber Resilience
• How COVID-19 has exposed a lack of cyber resilience
• What climate change means for cyber resilience
• How do you achieve cyber resilience?
• Summary and key takeaways
What is Cyber Resilience?
The ability of a company to enhance business acceleration (enterprise resiliency) through the prevention, mitigation, and recovery of cyber threats is known as cyber resilience. A cyber-resilient organization can adjust to crises, threats, catastrophes, and challenges that are both known and unknown.
Cyber resiliency’s main goal is to aid an organization to flourish in challenging situations (such as financial volatility, crisis, pandemic, etc.).
An organization’s cyber resilience is its capacity to defend itself against, detect, respond to, and recover from cyberattacks.
An organization’s cyber resilience is its capacity to defend itself against, detect, respond to, and recover from cyberattacks.
By being resilient, organizations can reduce the impact of an attack and ensure that they can continue to operate effectively.
The concept refers to the ability to carry on achieving targets in the face of challenging cyber events such as cyberattacks, natural disasters, or economic crises.
In other words, an organization’s ability to carry on with its business operations with limited to no downtime is affected by a measured level of information security proficiency and resilience.
Why cyber resilience is important
For business continuity, a cyber resilience strategy is essential. It can provide additional benefits beyond improving an enterprise’s security posture and lowering the threat of exposure to its major infrastructure.
Additionally, cyber resilience aids in minimizing financial loss and harming reputation. A cyber-resilient company can also improve its competitive advantage by maximizing the value it generates for its clients and operating efficiently and effectively.
Mitigating financial loss.
Stakeholders in the company, for instance, shareholders, investors, employees, and customers, may lose faith in the company if it experiences a financial setback.
Gaining customer trust and business.
Some companies adhere to international management standards like ISO/IEC 27001 set by the International Organization for Standardization to attract customers and secure their business. An information security management system (ISMS) can use the requirements of ISO/IEC 27001 to manage the security of assets like employee profiles, financial information, intellectual property, or confidential information of third parties.
Increasing competitive advantage
Organizations that are cyber resilient have a competitive advantage over those that are not. An efficient operation is created by companies that develop best management systems practices, like the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL). They also take this into consideration when developing a management system for cyber resilience. Therefore, these systems add value to their clients.
Maintaining business continuity
The operations of an organization can be slowed, paralyzed, or worse, halted by a cyberattack. You can keep your business running smoothly by being prepared for potential threats. If a virus, ransomware, or other malware falls through the cracks, it helps to get things back on track quickly.
Keeping customer data safe
You have varying quantities of electronic customer data, regardless of industry. This indicates that you are in charge of the data. Failure to protect the data can result in penalties, legal action, and decreased consumer confidence in your company.
Adhering to data protection and compliance regulations.
There are numerous geographical (like GDPR or CCPA) and industry-specific (such as HIPAA) data management regulations, that must be strictly adhered to. Building a solid framework for data protection and security is a good way to make sure that your workflows are still in compliance.
What is effective cyber resilience?
An enterprise-wide risk-based strategy, a collaborative approach driven by executives, partners, participants in the supply chain, and customers, is necessary for effective cyber resilience. It must manage risks, threats, and vulnerabilities in a proactive manner, as well as their effects on important information and supporting assets.
Governance, risk management, knowledge of data ownership, and incident management are also essential for effective cyber resilience. evaluating these traits also requires judgment and experience.
The benefits of cyber resilience
In a nutshell, cyber resilience enables you to:
- Reduce financial loses.
- Meet legal and regulatory requirements.
- Improve your security culture and internal processes.
- Protect your brand and reputation.
The Related Terms of Cyber Resilience
Information security often known as infosec focuses on preventing unauthorized access to information. It is a component of managing information risks and prevents or reduces the probability of unauthorized access, use, disclosure, corruption, modification, deletion, interruption, elimination, deletion, inspection, or recording.
Information risk management (IRM) is a method of risk avoidance that uses technology, policies, and processes to minimize the risk of cyberattacks from third-party suppliers, data security problems, and vulnerabilities. Inadequate data security frequently causes data violations, which have significant and negative effects on businesses.
Data security is the process by which sensitive data from unlawful access and corruption is protected throughout its entire lifespan. Data security uses a variety of techniques and technologies, such as data encryption, tokenization, two-factor authentication, key management, access control, physical security, logical controls, and institutional standards, to prevent unwanted access to data and preserve data privacy.
Network security is the process of preventing unauthorized access, misuse, malfunction, alteration, destruction, or inappropriate disclosure to the network infrastructure as a whole via the use of both hardware and software security solutions. This creates a secure platform on which computers, users, and programs can carry out their tasks in a safe environment.
Access control: A set of strategies that control and regulate access to a particular organization’s IT network. The most underlying concern is about how credentials, most notably user names and passwords, are used to access the network. In addition, the roles and information that users have access to are carefully controlled to ensure that privileges are revoked if a user quits the company or is assigned to a different duty. Strict regulations apply to password selection, which must be very complex and contain special characters to prevent password brute-force attacks.
Operational security: The variety of strategies to ensure that day-to-day IT operations do not contribute to risks. To guarantee that each network component is running the most recent version, software updates and patches must be monitored. Hackers constantly look for vulnerabilities in IT networks, so it’s important to keep an eye on them. Since companies’ finances can be accessible online, there is a threat that unauthorized transactions may take place as hackers have a strong motive to accomplish these goals.
A cyberattack is a subset of cyber risk that has many different meanings. It is typically an attempt to steal, manipulate, or destroy intellectual property or personal data. A cyber resilience strategy is one that builds competencies and skills within an organization using best practices. This includes the right tools and cyber-resilient solutions to build the capacity of the IT space during a critical incident.
A cyber resilience strategy is one that builds competencies and skills within an organization using best practices. In the event of a crucial incident, this includes incorporating appropriate tools and cyber resilience solutions to increase IT capabilities.
The Institute of Risk Management defines “Cyber risk” as any possibility of financial loss, disruption, or harm to an organization’s reputation resulting from a breach of its information technology systems.
Cyber risk is never solely the responsibility of the IT staff. The practice of risk management in an organization requires a deep understanding of constantly shifting risks, as well as practical tools and techniques for resolving them.
How COVID-19 has exposed a lack of cyber resilience
The COVID-19 pandemic shattered the global business environment and altered how the majority of businesses operate. More companies have more remote workers than ever before. This has increased many IT security risks, such as using brand-new systems, resources, and tools that their organization has never used before.
Many workers accessed company systems through personal devices or the home Internet, putting sensitive company data at risk. A Mimecast report titled “Securing the Enterprise in the COVID world” states that the number of cyber threats increased by 64 percent between 2019 and 2020.
What climate change means for cyber resilience
Climate change is one of the pressing issues facing the world today, and its effects are far-reaching. Companies ought to be prepared for the potential impact that this could have on their cyber resilience due to the fact that temperatures are predicted to continue rising over the coming decades and that global warming is already a fact of life.
This can occur in numerous ways. The IT infrastructure of organizations can be directly affected by climate change-related natural disasters like forest fires and unpredictability in the weather (hurricanes, floods, extreme weather).
How do you achieve cyber resilience?
Organizations can increase their cyber resiliee i many ways, including:
Enhancing security: Companies need to enhance their security standards to make it harder for intruders to access their systems.
Identifying attacks: In order for organizations to promptly respond to attacks and minimize damage, they need to be able to detect them quickly. This includes training employees to spot the signs of an attack and establishing systems to monitor for suspicious activity.
Responding to attacks: If an attack is detected, organizations must have a plan for how to respond to reduce damage. This includes whom to contact and what action to take.
Recovering from attacks: Organizations must be able to recover their data and systems after a successful attack. This includes having a plan for how to restore systems and having backups in place. This means setting up backups and having a plan in place for recovering systems.
Summary and key takeaways
- Cyber resilience refers to an organization’s capacity to protect itself against, detect, react to, and recover from cyberattacks.
- Cyber resilience also aids in minimizing financial losses and reputational damage. Additionally, through effective and efficient operations, a cyber-resilient organization can maximize the value it generates for its clients, enhancing its competitive advantage.
- In the world of Covid, the number of cyber threats shot up by 64% between 2019 and 2020.
- The most important steps in increasing cyber resilience are improving security, detecting attacks, responding to attacks, and recovering from attacks.
Check your understanding
Consider each of the following questions. Before moving on to the next question, review your reading to find the information you need if you are unsure of the response.
- What is cyber resilience?
- Why is cyber resilience important?
- What are the benefits of cyber resilience?