Cyber resilience emerged in 2000 as a strategy for minimizing the cost and impact of cyberattacks. It recognizes that it’s not always possible to prevent threats and disruptions. By combining incident response, risk management and business continuity, cyber resilience helps ensure organizations can recover quickly from disruptive events.

Several convergent trends are driving renewed emphasis on cyber resilience. Organizations have been accelerating digital transformation and adopting AI and other advanced technologies, increasing reliance on the IT infrastructure. At the same time, cyberattacks have become more frequent, advanced and costly. In addition, regulatory requirements increasingly mandate that organizations document a cyber risk strategy.

What Is Cyber Resilience?

Conventional cybersecurity strategies focus on preventing threats. Business continuity is designed to help the organization recover from a disruptive event such as a cyberattack or natural disaster. Cyber resilience integrates elements of both in an overarching risk management approach.

Furthermore, cyber resilience goes beyond security to cover a wide range of disruptive events. Whether the organization experiences a cyberattack, natural disaster, supply chain disruption or software glitch, an effective cyber resilience strategy will help minimize the impacts.

As such, cyber resilience encompasses more than the IT team. It must be an enterprise-wide strategy that’s driven by executive management and permeates every level of the organization. The strategy must be founded on an understanding of organizational risk and the potential impact of disruptive events on critical systems, processes and staff.

While there’s no “one size fits all” approach to cyber resilience, it does offer organizations a framework for understanding cyber risk, identifying weaknesses and prioritizing their efforts. Regular monitoring and reporting enable organizations to measure their performance against their cyber resilience goals and drive continuous improvement.

Six-Step Framework

Several entities and standards bodies have developed cyber resilience frameworks and scorecards. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework can also help guide the development of a cyber resilience strategy. These frameworks commonly consist of six steps.

The first is to identify all critical IT systems and data and gain an understanding of how they support key business processes. This information will help drive the development of the risk management strategy.

Over the next two steps, organizations should implement security measures to protect their environment and tools to rapidly detect threats. Organizations should then develop a plan to help them respond to a disruptive event. In the fifth step, organizations should identify the steps needed to recover their operations, such as restoring systems and updating applications.

The final step is perhaps the most important. Organizations should document and analyze disruptive events to help them adapt their cyber resilience strategy. The analysis can help identify improvements that could reduce risk and improve the organization’s ability to respond to future incidents.

Challenging Process

A cyber resilience strategy should be pragmatic and cost-effective, striking the right balance between detection, prevention and mitigation. It should also prioritize the most critical IT assets and events most likely to occur and cause disruption. It’s simply not practical to prepare for a black swan event, but organizations can and should learn from such events.

Done right, cyber resilience helps reduce the risk of financial losses during a disruptive event, and helps organizations gain competitive advantages and customer trust. It’s not easy to implement, however. Each organization has unique operational processes, regulatory requirements and other factors to consider. IT environments are complex, and there are countless potential risks.

Technologent’s experts can help you assess your IT environment to understand dependencies and determine what security tools you need to protect your environment. We can also help you develop security policies, safeguard your data and empower your users to recognize social engineering attacks. Let’s discuss how our comprehensive approach can help you shift from traditional cybersecurity to cyber resilience.