10 Tips for Building a Cyber Resilience Strategy

Cybercrimes are currently one of the biggest threats to modern businesses, and every year, thousands of cybercrimes take place. Organizations spend a lot of money and resources to secure their infrastructure, but still, most of them get hit by cyberattacks, leading to the halting of business operations and billions of losses. 

Building a cyber resilience strategy has become imperative in today’s scenario as it helps safeguard the business operation and mitigate all incoming risks. However, building a cyber resilience strategy can be tricky as the right strategy will not only prevent all the attacks but also help you to quickly bounce back from a breach. 

Today, we are going to discuss 10 tips for building a cyber resilience strategy that will protect your business from all kinds of attacks. 

What is a Cyber Resilience Strategy?

Cyber resilience strategy can be described as a well-structured plan designed by an organization to help them discover, respond, and recover from all types of cyber attacks.

Cyber resilience is a term that indicates an organization’s ability to safeguard its data, operations, infrastructure, and other digital services from all kinds of security events. The strategy covers a broad aspect of cyber security and blends with the organization’s risk tolerance, regulations, and objectives. 

When your organization builds a cyber resilience strategy, it gives them a proper approach to creating cyber resilience against all kinds of security threats. The main motive behind the strategy is not only to prevent cyber threats but also to prepare the organization for all types of adverse cyber situations. 

Importantly, it enables the organization to adapt to the evolving cyber threats and protect their data against modern cyber threats. In the modern evolving threat landscape, a cyber resilience strategy helps you proactively confront all the modern threats and minimize the harm. 

Cybersecurity vs Cyber Resilience: What’s the Difference?

Cybersecurity and cyber resilience are often considered similar, but in reality, they are quite different from each other. Cybersecurity of an organization focuses on methodologies and technical measures to help the organization fight against ever-evolving cyber attacks like security breaches and ransomware. 

Whereas cyber resilience showcases how well an organization is prepared against modern attacks and its ability to mitigate all kinds of damages.

Importantly, cybersecurity primarily focuses on methods to limit cyber threats from outside, while cyber resilience makes an approach to intervening in external and internal threats. It encompasses both adversarial threats as well as nonadversarial threats like human error, which gives the organization the ability to create a strategic approach.

Another way to distinguish between cybersecurity and cyber resilience is that cyber security considers making everything right to prevent cyber attacks. On the other hand, cyber resilience considers accepting the fact that a system can be compromised by hackers.

You can consider cybersecurity as the defense that minimizes the chances of any cyber attacks breaching the infrastructure or system. However, if cyber criminals are somehow able to breach the cybersecurity system, cyber resilience helps the organization minimize the impact.

Key components of a Cyber Resilience Strategy

A cyber resilience strategy involves various vital components that help the organization to identify, respond, and recover from a cyber incident. These key components play a crucial role in helping the organization to build a comprehensive strategy. These key components are: 

Assets

Assets serve as a key component when building a cyber resilience strategy because you need to know which things you need to protect. It is vital to identify all the vital assets of your organization, which usually include infrastructure, systems, services, and data. 

When you have a complete idea regarding the assets you need to protect, it becomes easier for you to build a robust strategy. An incomplete understanding of the assets, especially data, can lead to massive loss and allow attackers to steal or destroy sensitive data.

Incident Response Plan

Developing an effective incident response plan is another vital component of a cyber resilience strategy. When you have a robust incident response plan in place, it can help you to respond to any kind of cyber incident properly. 

While creating the response plan, you should make every member aware of their responsibilities and roles. The response plan should include all the vital data recovery processes and communication plans. The plan should be thorough as it will only enable the building of a robust strategy.

Authorized Access

It is essential for every organization to focus on access management and minimize the chance of bad actors getting easy access to vital databases. Numerous people have access to your system, so maintaining a weak access management can completely jeopardize the system. 

All the access should be limited to authorized users only, and you should have control regarding which users can access all the confidential data. While assessing the user’s access, it is also essential for the organization to evaluate the user behavior as it will help the team to report behavior that strays from regular patterns.

Conducting Team Members’ Training

In every organization, team members play a crucial role in maintaining security and cyber resilience strategies. In the end, it is the team member who will implement the incident response and minimize the impact of any security breach. 

So, it is essential to train these employees and empower them to enhance their ability to safeguard sensitive data and systems. Training the team members on various aspects of cybersecurity and promoting the culture of cybersecurity will help in strengthening the cyber resilience strategy. 

Moreover, training will help them understand different security risks and the appropriate methodologies they need to implement to protect the assets.

Continuous Improvement

To stay ahead of the ever-evolving cybersecurity landscape, your organization will have to keep up with modern advancements and improve security to minimize threats. 

A robust cyber resilience strategy requires continuous improvement as it will help the organization anticipate new attacks and develop the security system accordingly. You can take a proactive or adaptive approach, as both approaches will help you in different ways. 

Common Cyber Resilience Threats

Cyber resilience threats are varied and evolving, so every organization must be aware of them. Here are some common threats that have plagued organizations most of the time: 

1. Cyber Criminals

Without a doubt, cybercriminals are one of the prominent threats to the cyber resilience strategy of an organization. Cybercriminals serve as a constant threat, and they are always looking for ways to breach cybersecurity and extort data. From launching DDoS and malware attacks to ransomware, cybercriminals are always making an effort to breach an organization’s system.

2. User Errors

Along with crime activities by cybercriminals, user error contributes to the threat to the cyber resilience of an organization. Modern IT infrastructure and networks are highly complicated, and it often leads to various human errors that often lead to loss of data and halting business operations.

3. Non-existent Incident Response Planning

The incident response plan is a critical component of an organization’s cyber resilience strategy as it provides them with a response blueprint during an attack. 

When an organization doesn’t keep a documented plan of cyber incident response, it reduces its ability to respond to cyber incidents and increases the impact of the attack. The lack of an incident response plan ultimately hampers the cyber resilience strategy.

4. Lack of Backup System

The cyber resilience of an organization depends mainly on the backup strategy of the organization. To have an effective cyber resilience strategy, an organization needs to have a reliable backup system where they can backup all their assets. 

The lack of a backup system can jeopardize the whole strategy because the strategy requires the organization to restore assets after an attack.

5. Natural Calamity

Natural calamity also poses a huge threat to the cyber resilience of an organization as it can impact IT infrastructure and halt all processes, including firewalls. Natural disasters like earthquakes, storms, or floods can cause huge damage to the IT infrastructure as well as cyber resilience.

The Benefits of a Cyber Resilience Strategy

When you build a cyber resilience strategy for your business, it provides you with numerous benefits, and these perks are: 

1. Low Downtime

In modern times, downtime in business operations for a certain period can lead to huge financial losses. 

Cyber resilience strategies protect your business from facing huge downtime and ultimately save your business from staggering losses. According to Uptime’s 2022 reports, a huge number of companies have lost around $100,000 due to operation downtime caused by cyber attacks.

2. Enhanced Security

The most prominent perk of having a cyber resilience strategy is that it strengthens your organization’s overall cyber security and minimizes the chance of cyber threats. It not only reduces the impact of cyber attacks but also helps in discovering vulnerabilities and preparing for upcoming threats. 

A cyber resilience plan involves risk management, cybersecurity best practices, IRP, and continuous monitoring, which helps organizations provide better protection.

3. Seamless Compliance with Regulations

Whether it is GDPR, HIPAA, or CCPA, organizations have to strictly consider the regulatory requirements while developing their cybersecurity strategies. Cyber resilience strategies have become highly instrumental for organizations as they help them cater to requirements and showcase commitment towards optimum data protection.

4. Reputation Protection

When you have a solid cyber resilience strategy in place, it will help you to protect your reputation in the industry.

Not only that, but it also helps you to demonstrate your organization’s commitment to digital asset protection. With an effective cyber resilience strategy, you can not only minimize the damage to your infrastructure but also build trust among customers and stakeholders.

5. Competitive Edge

With a robust cyber resilience strategy, you also get a competitive edge over your competitors and place your organization as a trusted and reliable entity. Not every company emphasizes cyber resilience; thus, it will help you position your organization as a trusted entity.

6. Adaptation to Evoling Threats

A cyber resilience strategy involves continuous improvement, and ultimately, helps you address evolving cyber threats. It serves as a crucial component of modern cybersecurity because it helps you stay ahead of the curve. 

10 Tips for Building a Cyber Resilience Strategy

Building a cyber resilience strategy is not an easy task, and you need proper guidance to build them. Here we present to you the top 10 tips that will help you to create an effective strategy:

1. Create an Incident Response Plan

An essential recipe for a successful cyber resilience strategy is creating a well-documented incident response plan that indicates all the procedures to be followed during a cyber attack. The plan should cover all the procedures, methodologies, incident detection, and recovery processes. Importantly, the plan should be updated and tested at regular intervals to maintain effectiveness.

2. Emphasize Employee Training

Employees of your organization play a crucial role in building and maintaining the cyber resilience strategy. You should conduct regular training of your employees and make them aware of all the cybersecurity scenarios, best practices, and common threats. The training program should also cover how to identify threats and respond to them.

3. Conduct Regular Testing

Cyber threats are evolving with time, and no system is fully protected against modern attacks. Conducting regular testing and evaluation of your security controls, methodologies, and practices will help you discover gaps that need to be remediated. You can perform security audits, penetration testing, and vulnerability evaluation for evaluation.

4. Assessing the Overall Security Posture

You should regularly assess the overall security posture of your organization because any vulnerability or risk can jeopardize the strategy. Various assessment processes can be implemented to evaluate the process, and this assessment will help in developing a successful cyber resilience strategy.

5. Enforce Data Protection and Encryption

Protection of all sensitive information and business operations is the primary goal of every cyber resilience strategy. To ensure optimum protection, you should enforce various encryption and data protection procedures to safeguard the stored and transmitted data. Implementing a data classification framework and access control is one of the best ways to ensure the safeguarding and confidentiality of sensitive data.

6. Implement Collaborative Efforts

Cyber resilience strategy requires a collaborative effort, and it is best to take input from experts while building the strategy. It would be a wise move to partner with different experts or firms that will help you improve your cyber resilience capabilities. Gaining new insights and knowledge from experts will help you make the right effort.

7. Employ Continuous Monitoring

Having real-time visibility into your business operation, processes, and network is vital, and the best way to do it is by deploying continuous monitoring. You should leverage SEM tools, log analysis, and other methodologies to discover possible vulnerabilities in the system. Keeping a proactive approach will help in building a cyber resilience strategy.

8. Build a Proper Recovery Strategy

While building a cyber resilience strategy, focusing on the backup and recovery strategy is important. You will have to develop an effective strategy for backup and restoration of data that will help you during a serious security breach. All the data should be backed up on a regular basis, and you should conduct tests to ensure that the data are effectively restored.

9. Continuously Improve

Cyber resilience is not a one-time process, and you will have to regularly evaluate and improve your strategy to adapt to the latest cyber threats. You must implement cyber resilience best practices at regular intervals and continuously enhance the security posture to minimize the chance of any attack.

10. Stay Updated with the Latest Threats

To ensure an effective cyber resilience strategy, you will have to keep every team member updated with the latest cyber threats, cybersecurity trends, and compliance updates. You should participate regularly in webinars, follow cybersecurity blogs, and go through the latest news to stay updated.

FAQ

What is the primary goal of a cyber resilience strategy?

The primary goal of a cyber resilience strategy is to ensure the business operation can work effectively in a situation of cyber attack. It helps the organization to cope with known and unknown cyber threats and risks and recover from such situations. 

What are the 4 pillars of cyber resilience?

The 4 pillars of cyber resilience are to anticipate, withstand, recover, and adapt. The recovery aspect indicates the restoration of business operations after an attack. Anticipate shows that the organization anticipates possible threats. 

Withstand tells the organization has to take necessary measures to ensure business continuity in the face of adverse attacks. The adapt pillar indicates that the organization has to change functions and security controls to minimize the impact of attacks. 

What are the three Rs of cyber resilience?

The three Rs of cyber resilience are resist, respond, and recover. Resist involves deploying effective measures to prevent cyber attack whereas respond demonstates organization’s IRP to respond to cyber incidents. Recover indicates the recovery of crucial data and restore operation after an attack. 

What is the cyber resilience lifecycle?

The cyber resilience lifecycle is basically a framework that demonstrates various stages involved in maintaining cyber resilience in an organization. It includes stages like strategy, design, transition, operation, and improvement. 

Conclusion

When you decide to build a cyber resilience strategy for your organization, you will have to take a strategic approach to build it successfully. Our 10 tips for building a cyber resilience strategy will provide you with a practical guide that will help you quickly build and maintain resilience. In this article, we have covered all the necessary aspects you need to understand while building a resilience strategy.