Tips For Making Your Business More Cyber Resilient
We all know that resilience is a critical leadership and business quality – but did you know it’s also a vital aspect of cybersecurity? We’re talking about cyber resilience, a term that refers to a company’s ability to respond to unexpected IT events and maintain optimum digital security at all times.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) explains Cyber Resiliency 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.”
How do you apply cyber resilience to your business? By making your IT infrastructure as agile and robust as possible.
Putting this in context, imagine that one of your employee’s computers becomes infected with malware. In a resilient organization, the malware incident wouldn’t lead to all of your systems going down. By contrast, your security solutions would spot the infection before it spread, and then quarantine and remediate the issue before it led to a wide scale problem.
At the same time, the cyber resilient organization would quickly provide the impacted employee with a new device, so they could return to business-as-usual at a superfast rate.
The Risks Of Low Cyber Resilience
In the age of data breaches and compliance fines, cyber resilience is more than a nice to have. It’s a necessity. All organizations today deeply rely on digital systems to sustain their operations. Be it talking to customers, creating their services or for internal communications, we all use IT systems each day.
If these systems are impaired by a cyber-attack or natural disaster, one’s whole business is at stake. Downtime, data theft and loss, and poor connectivity can all impact the bottom line, leading to poor employee performance, a loss of customer trust and even compliance fines in instances where sensitive data is exposed to unlawful parties.
Combatting these risks is the essence of cyber resilience. Here’s how to achieve it.
Tips For Becoming Cyber Resilient
Below are our critical tips for becoming cyber resilient. It’s worth noting that, beyond helping you to fight fires, cyber resilience is also excellent for the bottom line, enabling you to boost efficiency, better withstand times of uncertainty and reduce costs.
Moreover, you’ll be pleased to know that becoming cyber resilient doesn’t require a total overhaul of your IT estate. Rather, it’s about embedding agility into your existing operations, with an eye to becoming more flexible, aware and data-driven.
In practice, this looks like the following:
Unlock The Power Of Automation
Automation is a crucial element of cyber resiliency, enabling your business to react to potential security threats at lightning speed and with little manual intervention. You see, while it might take a human days to manually analyze log reports for evidence of a breach, it takes automation just seconds.
Build in Redundancies
Redundancies boost cyber resilience by ensuring that, if there’s an issue with one aspect of your IT infrastructure, you have a backup ready to go. For example, if your server starts malfunctioning, you should have a secondary one ready to go in its place, so you can continue working undisrupted while your managed IT provider remediates the issue.
Monitor and Detect 24/7
One of the most powerful automated tools you can use to boost cyber resilience are monitoring and detection tools. These solutions work by scanning your IT environment for signs of malicious intruders, attempted data theft and evidence of malware. By catching these issues early-on, you can address problems proactively and nip them in the bud.
Backup Your Data
Backing up your data is super important for cyber resilience. If the worst were to happen and you lost your data due to a ransomware attack or system outage, your backups would enable you to continue business as usual.
Implement and Regularly Practice an Incident Response Plan
Lastly, cyber resilience involves preparing for the worst-case scenario, so you know how to handle disruption calmly and effectively. This is where incident response comes in.
Your incident response plan is your guidebook for security incidents like data breaches and natural disasters, empowering you to respond to these incidents knowledgeably by following step-by-step actions. In fact, having a well-rehearsed incident response plan reduces the cost of a data breach by $2.66 million.
Having an incident response plan alone isn’t enough, though. You also need to rehearse it regularly, ensuring that each team member involved knows their responsibilities, the chain of the command and who to contact.
Improve Your Organization’s Cyber Resiliency Today!
Unbound Digital can help your Johnson City business improve cyber resiliency with our suite of holistic, best-in-class security tools. Give us a call to find out more about how our expert cybersecurity and IT team can help you boost your cyber defenses today!