Cyber Resilience: Change Your Approach To Data Security
Cyber resilience is defined as the ability of an organization to deal with cyberattacks or data breaches while continuing its business. It protects the organization from various cyber risks and malicious attacks by limiting their severity, while allowing the business to run uninterrupted.
The popularity of cyber resilience is rising day by day in the IT sector as it is found to be more effective than “cybersecurity.”
How Is Cyber Resilience Different From Cybersecurity?
Cybersecurity comprises of technology, processes and preventive measures to protect a system from a cyberattack. In case the security is breached through any loophole, a business becomes vulnerable.
On the other hand, cyber resilience is a wider concept as it prepares the organization to survive a cyberattack. It not only focuses on preventive measures but also on resilience in the event of a cyberattack or security breach, intentional or otherwise.
It’s Time To Change Your Data Security
With the advancement of technology, hackers have also evolved. Nowadays, it is not very difficult for them to break security and halt the overall business mechanism. Preventive measures such as anti-spam, anti-virus, firewalls, and anti-malware are not enough to stop them.
Therefore, you should go beyond preventive security measures and focus on resilience. While using any cybersecurity method, no matter how costly or effective it is, there is always a probability of getting attacked or a security malfunction.
Meaning, you will have to keep in mind what will happen if the security surrenders to the hackers or breaches. This is where cyber resilience comes into the picture, through preventive measures plus business resilience.
Basic Elements Of Cyber Resilience
Following are the 4 basic elements of a cyber resilience system:
- Manage and protect
- Identify and detect
- Respond and recover
- Govern and assure
14 Techniques To Improve Cyber Resilience
Special Publication 800-160 Volume 2, published by The National Institute of Standard’s & Technology (USA), lists the following 14 techniques to improve cyber resilience:
- Adaptive Response
To respond to the cyberattack in a timely and calculative manner - Analytical Monitoring
To monitor and detect the adverse actions in time - Deception
To mislead your adversaries about the critical assets of the company - Coordinated Protection
To devise a deep defense strategy to create multiple obstacles for your rivals - Diversity
To attack the common modes of failures that can expose the system - Dynamic Representation
To read and represent the behavior and pattern of your potential competitors - Dynamic Positioning
To recover quickly from any non-intentional hostile acts by an adversary by diversifying network distribution - Privilege Restriction
To restrict the basic privilege to the attributes of the users - Non-Persistence
To reduce the exposure to corruption and compromises - Realignment
To reduce the probability of affecting a critical service from the failure of a non-critical service - Redundancy
To provide multiple securities to critical services - Segmentation
To define and separate a system based on worthiness and criticality - Substantiated Integrity
To check whether critical elements are corrupted or not - Unpredictability
To make random and unexpected changes to make your system uncertain for your rivals
Benefits Of Cyber Resilience For An Organization
Cyber Resilience provides the following benefits to your organization:
- Reduces financial losses by providing overall security and resilience to the system
- Improves the culture and process of your system by the privilege restrictions within the system
- Complies with legal and regulatory requirements of your company or organization
- Provides overall protection to your brand reputation
- Maintains the continuity of your business operations in case of any cyberattack or security break-in
Conclusion
In this era of advanced technology, cybersecurity is not enough for the protection of your organization’s cyber interests and assets. Cybersecurity works on the principle of lock and key. But, every lock has a key that can be duplicated. Similarly, protection provided by cybersecurity will fail, sooner or later.
Therefore, you need to ensure that your company can continue its business operations despite cyberattacks by hackers and your rivals. This is where cyber resilience comes into play—building continuity and resilience in the interests and assets of your organization.
