Key Steps for Ensuring Business Continuity

If your company has a cybersecurity strategy, ensuring resilience is vital to your plan. Cybersecurity Resilience means having the capability to recover from any cybersecurity incident. In this blog post, you will learn why it’s important and which elements to consider for business continuity.

First, let’s go over this term’s definition, IBM defines it as “an organization’s ability to prevent, withstand and recover from cybersecurity incidents”. The National Institute of Standards and Technology includes some other characteristics. It says: “(…)The ability to adapt to adverse conditions, stresses, attacks, or compromises on systems that use or are enabled by cyber resources.

Differentiating cybersecurity from cybersecurity resilience

The main difference between cyber resilience and cybersecurity is the moment in which your company must rely on each. A cybersecurity strategy is of great help in preventing cyber attacks like data breaches or malicious activity in the form of ransomware.

On the other hand, cyber resilience mitigates the impact of attacks on an operation and economic slumps or natural disasters. Having a plan for both moments is as important as understanding their reach for your business’s safety and continuity.

A cyber resilience plan is effective when it’s proactive towards the risks, threats, vulnerabilities and effects on critical information. It’s also effective as it considers risk management, governance and incident management.

Why is cyber resilience necessary?

The main consequence of having solid cybersecurity resilience is that it brings business continuity. After an attack, even though it means a challenge, the resilience plan allows a company to continue delivering intended outcomes. The following are also some of the main benefits:

• Reduces financial loss and reputational damage after a crisis. A well-attended incident gains customers’ trust and creates value for the customers.
• Increases its competitive advantage after circumstances that affected several competitors of the same market or product. It allows effective and efficient operations to move forward.
• Reduces the risk of exposure to its critical infrastructure.
• Recovering with minimal downtime reduces data loss and business instability.

Cybersecurity resilience makes sense when working coordinately with the cybersecurity strategy. The following are some basic steps to ensure the best response before, during and after any cyber attack:

1. Backup data regularly. It will be of great help in protecting data, but also ensuring the return to normal after a cyber attack.
2. Simulate a security incident, so it helps you strengthen your cyber security strategy. This step will also let you understand the importance of training your employees towards a similar circumstance. At the same time, you will learn how to escalate the security breach situation if needed.
3. Understand how to understand and interpret data related to cyber security vulnerabilities. The right metrics will always greatly help the teams and even the managerial team.

To finish, remember that cyber security is an ever-changing environment. Each experience is an opportunity to evolve, design or redefine your cybersecurity resilience strategy. If you want to learn more about cybersecurity services and support