There are a lot of threats that organizations can face to their operations and overall well-being. A cyberattack is a constant one and it can cost a company hours or days of downtime and associated costs.
The current average global cost of downtime is $4.35 million, according to the IBM Security “Cost of a Data Breach” report. The report also states that for 83% of companies, it’s not a case of “if” a data breach will occur, but “when.”
Beyond challenges to cybersecurity, companies also face downtime due to other technology problems. Servers crash, networks go down, and backups can fail to restore all data expected.
Operations are intertwined with the need to keep technology systems operational and protected from cyber threats. Cyber resilience is about proactively addressing these needs to ensure a company can quickly bounce back from a cyber incident.
What Is Cyber Resilience?
Cyber resilience is an organization’s ability to proactively prevent, endure, and recover from cybersecurity incidents. It’s a combination of cybersecurity strategy, business continuity, proactive vulnerability management, data and cloud security, and disaster recovery.
The more cyber resilient an organization is, the less downtime it experiences in the aftermath of a cyberattack, and the faster it can resume operations.
Downtime Costs
Downtime is expensive in itself. While remediating a data security incident has other costs involved, just the fact that a business is down and not operating can mean between $100,000 to $540,000 in costs every hour.
Downtime expense estimates include a combination of factors, such as lost productivity, lost business, inability to service customers, and more.
Reasons Cyber Resilience Is Important
Emphasizing cyber resilience in an organization has multiple benefits. These go beyond improving cybersecurity and lowering risk. When taking a cyber-resilient approach, leadership is thinking beyond just mitigation of the impacts of an attack. It includes expanding strategies throughout the organization to ensure all components of an operation are resilient enough to bounce back quickly from a cyber incident.
Some of the advantages of cyber resiliency include the following.
Avoids Financial Loss
Companies that prepare and plan for resiliency reduce the costs of a cyberattack. For example, if a company has a practiced incident response plan, it can reduce the average cost of a data breach by $2.66 million.
Improves Competitiveness
The playing field has been leveled for companies of all sizes thanks to cloud technologies. The subscription model for SaaS has enabled companies to afford higher-end software capabilities that they may not have had in the past due to the all-in cost of purchase.
To gain a competitive edge, companies need to operate more efficiently. This includes following best practices for systems and operations that enable them to remain resilient.
For example, if multiple organizations suffer a ransomware attack, those that are able to get their operations back up and running the fastest, and that mitigate costs will have the advantage.
Fosters Customer Trust
Downtime and data breaches don’t only impact your business. Your customers/clients also are impacted. How you handle the incident and how soon you return to business as normal will influence whether they decide to stay a customer.
Components of Building Cyber Resiliency
Protect & Mitigate
It’s important to mitigate the potential number of cyber incidents that may occur. This is done by protecting your technology infrastructure as well as data and digital assets.
Your cybersecurity strategy should include all devices and data, no matter where they reside. Best practices include things such as:
- Network security
- Endpoint security (antivirus, DNS filtering, etc.)
- Lifecycle management
- Cloud security
Monitor & Detect
The faster a threat can be identified, the faster it can be dealt with. Incidents and associated downtime can be mitigated when monitoring and threat detection are put in place.
This includes regular network monitoring such as scanning for vulnerabilities, so they can be addressed before they enable a major cyberattack.
Practiced Response
Your team needs to know what to do when any type of cyberattack happens. An incident response plan provides a step-by-step guide for the things to do if a cyber incident happens.
This plan can’t only be put down on paper, it needs to be practiced regularly (just like fire drills). This enables your team to run through the response more efficiently and in an orderly manner should an incident happen.
Evolve & Adapt
Things in the digital world evolve rapidly. This includes threats and the tools used to detect, repel, and address them. You should ensure that you are revisiting your cyber resiliency strategy at least annually, to keep it updated and always adapting to the evolving technology ecosystem.
Become More Cyber Resilient with Help from CyberWizPro
CyberWizPro can help your mission-critical facility or organization plan and implement an effective plan for cyber resilience.