Strategies to Build Cyber Resilience

The Importance of Cyber Resilience

Resilience is like a rubber floor. Falls will happen–that’s life. The important thing to understand is that resilience is the ability to bounce back from adversity. If you do not innately have this ability, then you have to create and build up resilience. It is unquestionable that businesses and cyber systems they run on have to properly prepare to deal with potential issues. They need built-in protection. If you have doubts about your business being ready to tackle problems, then the following information is for you!

Threats are Real

Why should cyber resilience be such an important construct for enterprises? Look around. Businesses depend on technology for almost every function. If technology fails, company operations will stagnate. Entrepreneurs can do without this particular risk of business failure. Unfortunately, like in the real world, failures will happen, and technology will eventually let you down. Very often, the underlying reason is not a simple power source or component failure but unanticipated, deliberate cyber attacks and cybersecurity threats targeting your business. Large companies need to be extra careful.

Unethical hackers and cybercriminals are the new villains on the horizon. They are after data, the new gold rush, and they don’t use picks and shovels; they have sophisticated technological tools to break into and access your computer systems. They use the vulnerabilities of the system to attack business-critical applications and steal data or demand ransom. Such unanticipated disruptions can prove fatal for the survival of the business as they impact business continuity and, much worse, stakeholders’ confidence and trust in the business. Resilience is therefore very important to incorporate in tandem with protection so that if some security breach does occur, the recovery to restore ‘business as usual’ process is made with the swiftness of a superhero. The incident will go unnoticed to the outside world.

Developing Resilience Strategy

A purposeful cyber resilience strategy should have the following broad contours to effectively counter impending threats:

Readiness

A blueprint of who will do what, when, and how must be drawn up and documented. Incident response framework policy should be an integral part of cybersecurity and risk management policies. The framework should incorporate a centralized command center which will become a single point for collaboration and coordination amongst various adverse event management response teams. This plan to be made known to all employees enterprise-wide. The specified protocols must be reviewed periodically.

Identification

Identify all the critical assets and resources which if subjected to successful cyberattacks, will impact the integrity and operations of the business. Such core assets, including backups of data, should be prioritized for intensive cybersecurity drills. Protective arrangements that will insulate these business-critical resources from adverse events to be implemented.

Testing

Preparedness of the system, employees, recovery protocols, and incident response strategies should be tested under simulated conditions. Learnings from these response assessments to be applied for fine-tuning the policies and keeping them in line with evolving situations.

Consult Specialists

The key objectives of any cyber resilience strategy are to limit damage, improve recovery time and restore operations swiftly. It is always better to consult security specialists who can assess a business’s state of affairs in this crucial area and suggest solutions. RP Tech has experts that have a deep understanding of business continuity and disaster recovery. Contact them for your cyber resilience requirements and discover that a friend in need is a friend indeed.