Cyber security has become a major concern in today’s digital age, with technology and cyberspace playing an integral role in the day-to-day activities of companies and individuals alike.
Thus, it is important to ensure that your business is not just resilient to cyber risks but also prepared to mitigate them successfully in the event of an attack or breach.
This blog post provides an overview of cyber resilience and its importance for your business along with steps you can take to improve your company’s preparedness against cyber threats.
Why Does Your Business Need Cyber Resilience?
As today’s businesses become more dependent on technology, cyber resilience becomes increasingly vital. Cyber threats are also becoming ever more frequent, so it’s important to have an up-to-date approach that focuses on prevention, detection, and recovery. Cyber Resilience refers to the ability to prepare for, respond to and recover from cyber incidents.
The term has become common over the years because traditional cyber-security practices are no longer useful to protect businesses from costly attacks.
Cyber resilience helps you plan and protect against cyber risks, protect against and minimize the impact of attacks, and ensure productivity despite an attack.
Understanding the Difference Between Cybersecurity and Cyber Resilience
Cybersecurity and cyber resilience are often used interchangeably. But they are two different practices. Cybersecurity aims to reinforce an organization’s defenses to prevent cybercriminals and malicious programs from breaching its network, data, and IT system.
It covers strategies and actions to keep threats at bay and protected company data from theft, loss, or damage.
While cybersecurity is a vital part of the security strategy of any organization, you never know when your data falls for any cyber attack. Enter cyber resilience. Cyber resilience is a more serious approach, including creating solutions and clearly defining the actions that are to be implemented when cybersecurity fails.
It is a comprehensive concept encompassing business continuity, protecting important processes, identifying a potential threat, managing threats and mitigating the severity of attacks, and incorporating procedures to resist cyber-security incidents. Cyber resilience lets you continue normal business operations without any disturbance during and after cyber attacks or technical failures.
How to Build Cyber Resilience For Your Business
Identify Cyber Vulnerabilities in Your Network:
In addition to protecting information like customer data, financial records, and trade secrets, it’s important to think about which systems within your organization might be most vulnerable.
For example, if hackers gained access to one of your manufacturing facilities they could sabotage production lines or even destroy inventory. Identifying where vulnerabilities lie is crucial in developing an effective cyber resilience strategy that includes preventative measures, as well as contingency plans, should disaster strike.
Simply put, the best way to defend against these attacks is to identify vulnerabilities in your network before an attack happens.
By knowing what’s at risk, you can take steps to prevent cyberattacks from occurring. A good place to start is with a vulnerability assessment of your network.
This will help you find any holes that could put your company at risk of a cyberattack.
Create an Action Plan to Reduce Risks
Cyber-attacks have become a more pressing concern over recent years. It’s not hard to understand why.
Nearly every major company has been affected by some form of cyberattack, from Target to Home Depot to eBay.
This makes it clear that cyber attacks can be detrimental to any business, no matter how big or small they are. If you want your business to be able to weather a cyberattack, whether it be information theft or security breach, you’ll need effective risk management practices or an action plan in place in order to ensure your company stays protected.
In this context, below are some concerns you should consider in your action plan.
What risks are you willing to take? Which threats do you find acceptable? And what has to be protected above all else? What data must be protected at all costs? Is anything truly not expendable if it falls into wrong hands? Where would you draw that line? Or, to ask it another way: If sensitive data was leaked or stolen, would anyone notice, let alone care?
Promote Awareness and Training:
Can you tell what is the weakest cyber-security link a hacker can exploit?
For example, it is your employee who can share the passwords or lose their laptop or devices containing sensitive information.
And it has become quite common that people tend to open malicious emails despite knowing that it could be risky. Those errors can be costly. You should not wait until an incident happened to invest in.
That’s why it is important to train your employees over cyber-security. It will help them identify the risks as well as what to do in case those risks occur.
As you continue to train employees about cyber resilience, keep track of what works and what doesn’t so you can create more effective training sessions down the road. A good way to do that is through surveys after each session where employees rate their level of understanding about different topics (on a scale from 1–5).
This will help identify which topics need more attention than others. So you must have understood cyber resilience and how to deploy it for your business. If you are looking for a serious cyber resilience approach, you can get in touch with our cyber security experts offering professional cyber resilience services.