Businesses reacted to the pandemic’s repercussions in various ways and underwent numerous transformations. It had an impact on the business workforce, supply chains, capital ratio, etc. The most compelling of these is the switch from traditional to digital channels during and after the pandemic. Businesses need to develop resilience not just against pandemics but also against other threats. While COVID-19 was a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence, any form of unforeseen situations, such as natural disasters, sharp changes in the economy, terrorism (physical or cyber), and more, all need to be taken into account when developing a business resilience strategy.
How will Cyber Resilience Enable Enterprise Resiliency
Businesses typically have a robust disaster recovery plan in place to prepare for potential disasters. This plan must and should include a strategy for being cyber resilient during cyber catastrophes as well as any other situation that puts vital systems at risk. Building crisis “shock-absorbers” that can maintain corporate operations, customer outreach, and continuous business transformation throughout crises is the key to fostering enterprise resilience.
Why Build Resilience
Most cybersecurity initiatives are still hindered by businesses’ ingrained habit of spending money on protective measures. Their inability to thoroughly assess the complex environment of risks and hazards is primarily to blame for this, which frequently manifests itself in the deployment of several-point solutions that typically have a shorter shelf life. The inadvertent vulnerabilities induced by digital transformation, IoT adoption, and hyper-convergence can make this situation worse.
The strategies and procedures used to mitigate the severity of cyberattacks must adapt as such attacks become more nefarious and techniques become more sophisticated. To survive and adjust to the cyber outage scenarios prevalent today, businesses require new technology and procedures. To meet these new circumstances, traditional recovery plans must be modified, which calls for new strategies and collaboration between the disaster recovery and security teams.
Managing Complex Challenges and Risks – How Different is Cyber resilience and Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery Strategies
It can be harder to differentiate important workloads from other workloads using outdated network infrastructure since many businesses continue to use ageing infrastructures and procedures. Many firms have business continuity and disaster recovery strategies, but because of their current configurations, they may not be able to easily recover from catastrophic cyberattacks. Additionally, the effectiveness of current incident response plans against emerging cyber threats may be criticized.
For an organization to be able to recognise, respond to, and recover from a cyberattack, there are many different policies, techniques, and solutions that fall under the umbrella of cyber resilience. By learning from each incident, it not only ensures an efficient disaster recovery strategy in the event of an attack but also a robust and dynamic security posture. The goal of the cyber resilience framework is to develop adaptable, comprehensive, and cost-effective end-to-end security solutions. A number of best practices are also included below
Contrarily, business continuity refers to an organization’s capacity to manage challenging circumstances (such as man-made disasters, natural tragedies, supply chain failure, or losing a key employee), in order to maintain operations with the least amount of disturbance as possible. It also offers a means of reducing these risks by establishing a framework for carrying out an organization’s essential duties in the worst-case scenarios.
Practices to be implemented:
- Identify essential resources, systems, and information. The organization needs to be aware of the resources needed to support crucial tasks in a business setting.
- Secure critical infrastructure assets. Here, the company sets up the first line of defense to reduce or neutralize the effects of any potential threat.
- Respond immediately whenever a security breach is identified. To ensure that operations continue as usual in the event of a cyberattack, this function entails end-to-end incident response procedures.
- Restore any infrastructure or services that were damaged or lost as a result of a cyberattack. The major goal of this step is to quickly resume normal operations.
Accelerated digital transformation, hyper-convergence, a growing threat environment, and malicious attackers all contribute to unanticipated risks, weaknesses, assaults, and failures. This has increased the need for cyber resiliency even more. To be able to lower the risks, financial impact, and brand damage, a cyber resilience strategy can be the best tool for a business.
About the author:
Manish Chasta is the Co-Founder and CTO at Eventus TechSol.
