Why is Cyber Resilience Important?
Despite an organization’s best efforts, it’s likely that they will eventually be the victim of a successful cyberattack. For example, if an employee types their credentials into a phishing page, the company may have no way of detecting the breach until the attacker accesses their network or applications.
Cyber resilience is important because it enables an organization to manage those cybersecurity incidents that can’t be prevented. Having an incident response team with the right tools and processes in place can dramatically reduce the duration and impact of a cybersecurity incident.
How Does Cyber Resilience Work?
Risk assessment lies at the core of effective cyber resilience. If an organization can identify the most likely risks and threats that it faces, it can implement security controls and processes designed to address these threats.
For example, ransomware is a major threat faced by organizations of any size and across all industries. By acknowledging this threat, an organization can take steps to improve its defenses against this. For example, deploying email security and antimalware solutions improves the probability that an organization can identify a phishing email or the malware that it delivers. The company can also have strategies in place for quarantining infected systems to stop the spread of the malware and restoring systems whose data has been encrypted.
The Goals of Cyber Resilience
A cyber resilience program is intended to maximize an organization’s ability to handle a cyberattack. Some common goals of cyber resilience include the following:
- Enhancing Availability: Cyberattacks have the potential to knock systems offline or degrade their performance. Implementing a strong cyber resilience program can help to ensure that an organization can block attacks before they have this effect or minimize downtime before normal operation is restored.
- Minimizing Cyberattack Impacts: The longer that a cyberattack lasts, the more opportunity that the attacker has to steal data or cause damage to the organization. Cyber resilience ensures that an organization can quickly and correctly identify and respond to a cybersecurity incident, restoring normal operations quickly and minimizing the impacts and costs to the organization.
- Ensuring Business Continuity: In some cases, it may take a while to restore an organization’s systems and operations to normal after a cybersecurity incident. A cyber resiliency strategy may include processes for maintaining some level of operations during the incident until recovery is complete normal operations can be restored.
Components of Cyber Resilience
Cyber resilience involves identifying potential threats to the business and taking steps to manage them. Some important components of a cyber resilience strategy include the following:
- Regular Security Assessments: Cyberattacks commonly exploit vulnerabilities within an organization’s cybersecurity posture. Performing regular vulnerability and risk assessments can enable an organization to identify likely vectors by which they might be attacked.
- Risk Management: Based on the results of security assessments, an organization can implement a risk management policy. This might involve eliminating some risks, managing some, and accepting others.
- Incident Response Planning: Having an incident response team (IRT) and plan in place can dramatically reduce the duration and impact of a cybersecurity incident. The IRT should have plans and tools in place to manage likely risks and threats identified by the security assessment and risk management.
- Employee Education: Employees’ actions could leave an organization vulnerable to attack or decrease the impact of a cyberattack. Employee education can inform users about common risks to look out for and how to respond in certain situations.
- Business Continuity Planning: Business continuity (BC) strategies focus on keeping the company functional during an ongoing security incident. For example, an organization may work to rapidly restore critical systems or have backups in place to maintain operations if they go down.
- Disaster Recovery Planning: Disaster recovery (DR) strategies are designed to bring the organization back to normal operations after an incident has been managed. These might include plans for bringing systems back online based on the relative importance of various applications or any dependencies that exist between them.
Bolster Your Cyber Resilience with Check Point
A cyber resiliency plan is an important component of any organization’s cybersecurity strategy. Threat prevention is essential to protecting the enterprise, but some attacks might slip through the cracks. Having a plan and the required resources in place to manage these incidents can significantly decrease the potential impact that they have on the company.
In addition to providing industry-leading threat prevention solutions, Check Point can also help your organization improve its cyber resiliency through its security consulting services. To learn more about how to enhance your ability to manage cyberattacks, contact a Check Point security expert today.
