Cyber resilience is all about ensuring your organization operates as usual while attempting to detect, prevent, control, and recover from threats against its IT infrastructure and data. If you don’t have a robust cybersecurity framework in place, your organization is leaving itself open to potential cyberattacks. And if a cybercriminal is successful, he or she could access your infrastructure, networks, and devices to steal or destroy your sensitive data.
That cannot only be financially damaging. It can also ruin your organization’s reputation. So, adopting a strong cyber resilience strategy is crucial for business continuity. While you’re sure to know about cyberattack prevention methods like using firewalls and antivirus software, maintaining cyber resilience goes beyond such basic practices.
A standard cyber resilience framework contains five main elements. They are:
There are several ways in which you can improve your cybersecurity framework.
For instance, you should consider hiring a chief information security officer who is highly skilled in incident response.
He or she would help to develop a more comprehensive cyber resilience framework and educate managers about how to create better cybersecurity practices.
Other ways of improving your framework include:
Cyber resilience best practices can help your organization face a broad range of threats. So, in addition to the practical changes that you can make to your framework, make sure you adopt the following three best practices for cyber resilience.
You can improve your cybersecurity framework by ensuring all of your employees are educated about cyber resilience, not just the people working in IT security. That means making sure your employees understand how to avoid things like phishing attacks. It also means ensuring your employees always report breaches or suspected breaches immediately.
You not only need to educate all of your employees about cybersecurity. You also need to tell your customers what you’re doing to ensure their sensitive data remains safe. End customers are becoming more and more concerned about cyber threats, especially as cyberattacks are becoming more sophisticated. So, explaining your security program to your customers in an easy-to-understand way is more crucial than ever.
It’s a good idea to use illustrations and simple analogies to help customers understand what cyber resilience practices and policies you have in place. You can then retain existing customers and win new customers.
If your organization has board members, they might not be very informed about cybersecurity. Therefore, it’s just as important that you educate them as it is that you educate your employees and customers.
However, your board members won’t want to know the ins and outs of your cyber resilience. They will be more focused on how it affects the company. So, for instance, instead of simply providing board members with the results of phishing exercises, move to interpret those results in terms that they would appreciate.