Cyber resilience is an organization’s ability to either reduce the possibility of a cyber attack or diminish the impact of a potential cyber attack.
You could think of cyber resilience as vaccination to either prevent the disease which is akin to the cyber attack from occurring or greatly reducing the chance of its occurrence.
Cyber Resilience by Leadership
This needs to be said again. Cyber security is not the responsibility of an individual alone but rather a collective responsibility wherein everyone from the interns to the board members have a part to play. However, building cyber resilience is a call that top management has to make. The leaders in an organization should consider the followings and set forth the strategy for building cyber resilience.
Increased cyber risk visibility
A complete breakdown of exactly how many connected devices there are is needed to truly develop cyber resilience. It is also highly essential to adjudge which assets are deemed critical and the potential risks to draw up a contingency plan.
Regular data backups
A scenario in which a hacker can encrypt your data and extort money in exchange for your data is not uncommon but highly preventable. A cyber risk visibility assessment can quickly help you identify that traditional systems of storing data can make you the potential target of such an attack. CISOs merely have to ensure that the data is backed up regularly to gain the upper hand making the enterprise more resilient.
Using risk visibility to lay down automated processes
A deep dive into the company’s current security protocols can reveal the weakest links that can help CIOs and CISOs engineer automated processes to tackle these issues in real time.
Becoming cyber resilient is not easy. It all seems so simple.
‘Be proactive rather than reactive.’ ‘Take pre-emptive measures.’
So, what stops enterprises from becoming cyber resilient? There are a number of hurdles:
- Information Silos: Cyber resilience is primarily considered the responsibility of CISOs when every single member of the organization should participate.
- Ineffective seminars: Even in enterprises that recognize that cyber resilience is a business issue, it is still up to the CISO’s to impart knowledge to staff and management which may not be as effective as one might believe. The approach in these seminars is to change human behavior which is seemingly difficult and does not take into account breaches that have nothing to do with human errors.
- Retaining top talent: Businesses fail to hire and retain talented CISOs which can greatly affect the resiliency of the company.
Improving cyber resilience: A 3-step process
- Risk assessment: Factors that decide the inherent risk are technologies, distribution channels, services and products, infrastructure and the operating environment. Once this is assessed, a rating - high, medium or low is assigned. This can be thought of as the expected level of resilience.
- Maturity assessment: Every inherent risk level is then mapped to a maturity risk. The domains involved to assess maturity level are - Situational awareness, governance, protection, identification, detection, response and recovery and third-party risk management. This helps to identify the actual level of resilience.
- Roadmap: By assessing inherent risks and maturity levels, gaps are identified and consecutively solutions are deployed.