As digital technologies become increasingly important in daily life, we witness some worrying cybersecurity trends. Ransomware attacks and other cyber threats increase each year, making it essential for companies to consider cyber resilience.
Cyber resilience is an organization’s ability to assess, prepare for, respond to, and recover from cyber threats and incidents. The National Institute of Standards and Technology defines 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. Cyber resiliency is intended to enable mission or business objectives that depend on cyber resources to be achieved in a contested cyber environment.”
Why Is Cyber Resilience Important?
Historically, businesses focused on basic security measures, such as firewalls and antivirus software. The increase in use of technology across organizations, complemented by the increase of cyber threats, results in a natural trend to acquire more security tools. However, cyber resilience goes beyond deploying security tools. Organizations of all sizes must have an strategy that involves preventing attacks and planning how to respond to a cybersecurity event or major outage.
The recent CrowdStrike outage, which took down millions of Microsoft Windows systems worldwide and cost U.S. Fortune 500 companies $5.4 billion, shows how vulnerable many organizations are to IT operation disruptions. Cyber resilience policies help organizations respond to operational disruption during an outage or a cyberattack.
Implementing a cyber resilience policy requires consistent collaboration between IT, security, and other teams in organizations.
There are several cyber security standards and frameworks to contribute to cyber resilience. One example is the MITRE ATT&CK framework — a nonprofit, US-based cybersecurity standards organization that hopes to “arm a worldwide community of cyber defenders.” It was the first to launch the Cyber Resiliency Engineering Framework in 2011. MITRE describes cyber resiliency efforts as follows: “Information and communications systems, and those who depend on them, must be resilient in the face of persistent, stealthy, and sophisticated cyberattacks.”
Overall, cyber resilience is crucial for organizations of all sizes, as it enables them to maintain business continuity, protect sensitive data, comply with regulations, enhance reputation, and gain a competitive edge. By investing in robust security measures, incident response plans, and employee training, organizations can mitigate the impact of cyberattacks and ensure their long-term success.
Common Risks in Cyber Resilience
Understanding the risks associated with cyber threats is crucial for building a resilient strategy. Some of the most common risks include:
- Siloed IT and security teams make it difficult to be on the same page in relation to processes, plans, incident response procedures, and prioritization of tasks in the case of cyberattacks.
- Backups and data recovery policies being excluded from organization’s cyber resiliency strategy.
- Organizations lack of security policy enforcement or not following security best practices.
- Lack of employee cybersecurity training at all levels of the organization.
- A lack of consideration for the recovery elements of cyber resilience.
The impact of these risks can be devastating both financially and reputationally. According to Coveware by Veeam’s Q3 2024 report, the average ransomware payment was $479,237 — and that’s just a small part of the overall cost of disrupted operations, sales, and more.
Organizations often consider investment in the security-tooling side of resilience to be sufficient. In the event of a successful cyberattack or a major outage caused by something else, those organizations may flounder. Truly resilient businesses have a plan for responding to the threat, restoring their operations, communicating with stakeholders and affected users.
4 Components of Cyber Resilience and How It Works
Drawing on MITRE and NIST’s best practices, cyber resilience frameworks involve multiple steps, each designed to fortify your organization’s defenses.
1. Anticipate
Continuously review your hardware and software infrastructure and update inventory or software bill of materials. Scan for vulnerabilities. Build a cyber resilience strategy involving cooperation across the organization. IT and security teams must work with key stakeholders and leaders in other departments to identify critical infrastructure and understand the organization’s current workflows. Follow best practices, incident response planning to be ready to address cyber incidents. Make sure personnel has received cyber security training and has awareness of potential threats such as phishing, smshing, and social engineering.
2. Withstand
Put your security plan in place and monitor your infrastructure for unusual activity that could indicate malicious activity or cyberattacks. Implement security controls to prevent or mitigate attacks, for example SIEM or XDR software. Ensure production systems and data have backups, redundancy, and immutable backups. Apply Zero Trust principles such as least privilege and multi factor authentication (MFA).
3. Recover
Execute incident response plans to minimize damage. Make sure you have clean backups and ensure restore points without re-infection. Prioritize recovery of business-critical systems. Ensure the integrity of your backups through routine verifications and test the whole backup and recovery process frequently. Utilize cleanrooms for quarantine and recovery of backups. Inform stakeholders about the incident and recovery efforts.
4. Adapt
Evaluate your processes, policies, and systems; modify them to prevent repeated and evolving internal and external threats. Review your cyber resilience strategy regularly to verify it reflects the current state of your organization. If you change platforms, software, or workflows, update your policies and procedures to reflect your new systems. Conduct post-incident reviews to identify areas for improvement. Updated plans and procedures based on lessons learned. Stay informed about emerging threats, specially around ransomware.
This framework helps organizations better prepare for the inevitable cyber event and its potential fallout.
Cyber Resiliency Implementation
Building cyber resilience involves more than implementing security tools and resources; it requires a holistic approach that encompasses various best practices, as listed below.
- IT and security teams collaborate: Together, these teams can enforce an end-to-end cyber resilience approach.
- Data backups: Regularly backing up data is the first step to ensuring you can quickly restore operations in the event of a cyber incident. Concepts such as immutability, automated testing and verification, and malware detection can help ensure your data is clean and trusted. Test your backup and recovery process.
- Incident response plans: These are predefined steps your organization should follow if a cyber incident occurs. Make sure you have identified internal resources and third-party experts for every stage of an incident response.
- Consistent testing and evaluation: Both you organization evolving technologies and evolving threats require continuous testing of processes and policies as well as evaluation of security tools.
- Employee training: Everyone plays a role in protecting your business, customers, and data. Educating employees on recognizing and responding to cyber threats can significantly reduce the risk of systems compromise and cyberattacks.
These are just some of the measures recommended as foundational elements of a cyber resilience strategy. Every strategy should be tailored to fit your organization’s needs.
Building Cyber Resiliency with Veeam
In an era where cyber threats are inevitable, cyber resilience has become a cornerstone for any organization aiming to protect its assets and maintain business continuity. It’s not just about having the right tools in place — it involves having the right cybersecurity strategy, processes, and training. Building cyber resilience also requires fostering partnerships across IT and security teams.
Cyber resilience is a continuous journey. Your cyber resilience plans must evolve as your organization evolves and new threats emerge. Protecting your organization systems and data requires a proactive approach with regular assessments, updates, and drills to prepare your organization for what lies ahead.
Conclusion
In an era where cyber threats are not just probable but inevitable, Cyber Resilience has become a cornerstone for any organization aiming to protect its assets and maintain business continuity. It’s not just about having the right tools in place but also about having the right strategies, processes, and training’ requires partnership across IT and Security teams.
Cyber Resilience is a continuous journey that evolves as new threats emerge. It requires a proactive approach, one that involves regular assessments, updates, and drills to ensure that your organization is always prepared for what lies ahead.
Remember, the goal isn’t just to survive a cyberattack but to come out of it with as little damage as possible, both operationally and reputationally. In this context, Cyber Resilience is not just an IT or Security concern but a business imperative.
Learn why backups should be part of your cyber resilience plan.
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