What is Cyber Resilience and how can you achieve it?

As the cyberthreat landscape darkens each day, the term, cyber resilience is increasing in importance.

A cyber resilient company is in the best position to prepare for, respond to, and recover from a cyberattack. Being resilient, however, means much more than attack prevention or response. A cyber resilient enterprise can continue to function during an attack and is agile enough to adapt and recover from the incident.

While a protection-focused approach may have worked in the past, today’s enterprise must now move to adopt a strategy that is based more on endpoint resilience which, beyond protection, emphasises adaptability, exposure reduction, information gathering and discovery.

Cyber resilience transcends technology and can protect the interests of everyone involved, including the C-suite, staff, shareholders, and the board of directors.

Resilience comes down to having a self-healing capability. Think of it this way: if your company must rely on an external source to resurrect you, then you can’t call yourself resilient. Only those organisations with a self-healing property (being able to recover without human intervention) can be truly classified as resilient.

Ultimately, if the organisation has its eye on becoming more resilient, then it must incorporate technologies with the capacity of self-healing. Running around putting things back together isn’t the preferred state of a resilient enterprise.

SELF-HEALING: THE ONLY TRUE RESILIENCE

In the hardware world, we buy and deploy redundant systems: multiple firewalls, routers, switches, clouds, and cables. We do this because we expect our hardware defences to fail; there’s even a name for it: “failover”. The other term used often is High Availability, which just means more hardware deployed for failover.

In the software universe, the equivalent is resilience. But unlike hardware, you can’t just have clones of the same tools, controls, apps, and agents that play understudy to the primary control. When the primary control fails, the clone steps into the spotlight is not an idea that exists with software.

So, enterprises need to rely on resilient software controls, apps, and agents. But the only way you can claim you are resilient is if you have a self-healing capability. Without it, you don’t have the replacement, so there is no failover. It’s a crack in your security fabric.

IT ALL STARTS WITH A FRAMEWORK

While this resiliency may sound daunting and difficult to achieve, thankfully there is an existing framework from which the enterprise can leverage to improve their resiliency. The NIST Cybersecurity Framework (NIST CSF) outlines specific actions that organisations can perform to see success in their cyber security programs.