Steps toward increased resilience

#1

Assess your cyber environment

The path to cyber resilience begins with evaluating your operations environment. An assessment gives you a thorough understanding of security risks and insights to develop a comprehensive strategy, fortifying your organization against cyber threats.

Map out your critical assets, systems, dependencies and all other components of your cyber environment.
Identify security threats, key risks and potential security vulnerabilities in your digital infrastructure.
Assess the effectiveness of your organization’s security measures, identifying gaps or weaknesses in your defenses, including those that have already resulted in an undetected compromise or have been potentially exploited.
Use this intelligence to prioritize areas for improvement to tackle later as part of your strategic plan.
Build ongoing assessments into your cybersecurity strategy to catch issues before they become problems.

Attack surface discovery

Attack surface discovery involves exploring all avenues an attacker could use to infiltrate your systems and network. This includes discovering security risks and instances of shadow IT when employees adopt technology without first getting IT permission. Catching shadow IT can reduce your organization’s exposure to new security risks and reduce waste.

#2

Develop a resilience strategy

Use the insights gleaned from the assessment to build a foundation for resilience. An effective strategy involves robust policies, controls and procedures in line with your organization’s risk tolerance and business objectives.

Solidifying your strategy makes it easier to implement risk mitigation measures, strengthen your resilience posture, prepare for a worst-case security scenario and stabilize business operations if one occurs.

Ingredients for strategy success

When developing a comprehensive cyber resilience plan to protect your organization against cyber threats, prioritize incorporating several vital components.

Preparation and prevention that recognizes that resilience begins long before an attack occurs
Incident monitoring and response that provides visibility into possible attacks and minimizes the impact on operations
Backup and recovery that restores data and system functionality after an incident
Business continuity after a cyber attack or disruption
Employee training to educate employees about cybersecurity best practices and encourage a security-aware culture
Regulatory compliance to align your cyber resilience strategy with relevant legal and regulatory requirements
Continuous improvement of resilience capabilities through ongoing monitoring

#3

Establish cybersecurity fundamentals

After plotting your strategy, it’s time to transform your existing security measures by reassessing current security protocols, technologies and practices to address emerging threats and vulnerabilities. This allows you to better protect your assets, data and operations from cyber risks and disruptions.

Another cybersecurity imperative is strengthening your organizational readiness and response capabilities with incident response protocols, business continuity plans and disaster recovery strategies.

Core solutions for resilience

Managed detection and response: Identify cybersecurity incidents promptly and minimize their impact on operations and security posture. Round-the-clock monitoring and immediate response capabilities help to safeguard your organization against cyber threats and attacks proactively.
Attack surface discovery: Gain continuous visibility of exposed assets, enabling proactive risk mitigation, faster incident response and agile defenses as the environment and threats evolve.
Cyber resilience, integration and continuous innovation: Weave cybersecurity practices seamlessly into your organization’s operations, risk management and business strategies. Cyber threats are dynamic, so it’s crucial to advance cybersecurity measures to stay ahead of an evolving threat landscape.
Disaster recovery: Recover quickly from national disasters, like floods and earthquakes, and technological events, like server crashes, to minimize downtime and keep systems operable. Robust disaster recovery plans keep your business running smoothly after unexpected events.
Cyber recovery: Maintain business continuity and limit your organization's time without critical assets like data access and communication systems after a cyber attack. Disaster recovery principles and practices, such as backup protocols, serve as a foundation for cyber recovery efforts while requiring additional resilience and protection measures like isolating affected systems.
Cybersecurity incident response: Contain cyber attacks to prevent them from spreading and causing additional damage to your organization’s systems and data. Incident response secures your data and restores affected systems to production.