Cyber Resilience Strategy

Cyber resilience is the next stage of cyber security that accepts an attack is not only possible but inevitable. It expects that at some point, a threat will break your organisation’s security measures and attempt to exploit your data. Being cyber resilient means that a company has both the ability to prevent attacks and to mitigate damage and maintain business continuity when systems or data have been compromised. It employs advanced techniques to isolate and immobilise your data while the attack is happening and then quickly helps you get moving again once the threat is neutralised. It’s a more holistic approach than either Backup as a Service or Disaster Recovery as a Service. And where cybersecurity focuses more on protecting an organisation before an attack has occurred, cyber resilience embraces an end-to-end methodology that keeps the business operating even in the middle and aftermath of an attack. It represents the recommended best practice approach in terms of risk management.

WHY DOES IT MATTER?

The move to remote working has made a cyber resilience approach more critical than ever, but there’s evidence to suggest businesses already weren’t doing enough.  For instance, risks are prevalent in the following areas:

• User workstations are rarely equipped with effective, up to date and complete protection solutions, particularly remote workers.
• Basic workstation protection functions are often deactivated by default
• Remote business network access presents significant vulnerabilities that are often not addressed
• Organisations, particularly smaller businesses, very rarely put in place security monitoring and preventive intrusion detection
• Data stored on servers is rarely encrypted
• Backup infrastructure has in recent times become itself a target for bad actors

Many smaller companies rely only on free cybersecurity solutions or eschew security altogether. The challenge for both security providers and businesses is in securing a remote workforce and new, unsecured perimeters, especially across home networks and personal devices, which are already at an increased risk for an attack. Now is the right time to create a plan to tackle these challenges.

THE INITIAL STEPS TO TAKE

If you’re looking to implement a cyber resilience strategy, then we advise you to consider the following steps:

1. Clean it up – deploy a multi-layer security solution including using secure networks, installing multi-factor authentication, carrying out daily backups, phishing detection and education, segmenting the network to enable you to isolate and contain malware, keeping systems up to date with the latest installations, and protecting user access privileges.
2. Build a team – understand what kind of attacks might happen, how you’re going to stop them, how you’re going to get up and running again and what you can do to minimise your risk. To have the best incident response plan, you’ll want a team made up of senior members from every department.
3. Document & simulate – once you have a plan, write it down and set a schedule to revisit and update it. Then test your plan with regular simulations where you follow the steps outlined.
4. Train the fundamentals – it’s thought most ransomware attacks are preventable with sound security fundamentals. So, make sure your teams are practising good security habits and you’ve got at least a backup and disaster recovery plan in place for all critical systems.
5. Invest in Cyber Recovery – Cyber Recovery is the term used for systems designed to protect your most valuable data should the worst happen. CAE works with customers to provide cyber recovery solutions that deliver an immutable, vaulted copy of their most critical data for fast recovery in the event of a cyber-attack. CAE uses smart analytics software that can examine the data entering the vault and detect suspicious behaviour that could indicate an infection. The cyber vault provides a fast and simple method to recover your data; data that you can rely on to get your organisation up and running quickly. 

Getting started

If you’d like to speak to one of our Dell Cyber Resilience experts or one of our security consultants, get in touch on our cyber assessment page.