Strengthening Your Organization’s Cyber Resilience
How strong is your organization's cyber resilience? Is your company prepared to respond and recover from a cyber attack? Knowing your business’s potential weaknesses and the areas where the vulnerability may be plaguing your organization is a good place to start in your mission to strengthen your cyber resilience. New threats are emerging every day in terms of cyber crimes. According to the FBI's Internet Crime Report 2021, a record 847,376 complaints of cybercrime were reported to the FBI by the public, a 7 percent increase from 2020. Building cyber resilience has never been more important than it has in the last few years.
What Is Cyber Resilience?
According to Information Week, a digital magazine focused on news analysis, commentary on information technology, and cyber trends, cyber resilience is “the ability of an organization to anticipate, prepare for, respond to, recover from, and adapt to cyber threats.”Cyber resilience is a must-have for modern organizations because the reality is that no business is too small, too obscure, or too off-the-radar to be hit by a cyber attack. On one level, cyber resilience means that an organization can maintain critical business operations even during a cyber incident. On another level, it also means that they are “able to efficiently absorb, implement, and adopt new initiatives and security controls.” (Information Weekly)
Beefing Up Your Cyber Resilience
Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) and IT experts have shared their tips and ideas on how your organization, whether small or large can beef up cyber resilience over the next few weeks and months to ensure that your company does not become one of the growing statistics in this area. Here are a few of their suggestions to get you started.
Break Down the Components of Cyber Security
Break the problem into smaller parts. In other words, since cyber security is such a large issue to swallow in one bite, break it into the following parts. According to MTI security, “cybersecurity into five stages or frames of reference: identify the issues, protect, detect, respond, and recover.“ (MTI)
Identify Your Vulnerabilities
Every organization has its vulnerabilities. The key is making sure that those vulnerabilities do not become high-stakes risks! Identify what your top risks are such as human error, system security, phishing scams, malware, or ransomware, and make a priority list of issues you have identified.
Run Simulations
Whether it is a hacking incident or a ransomware event, your system and the people who run it should have been put through a simulation prior to the event. This simulation can help in the event that the “pretend event” becomes all too real. It will help with the diagnosis of the event and being able to spring into action when an incident does occur.
Encourage Collaboration
Cyber security is no longer just the responsibility of the IT team. It should be on the minds of everyone in your organization. That means everyone has a stake in keeping the systems and data protected. With better communication between IT departments and the rest of the business community, it is an all-hands-on-deck situation of spotting risks and vulnerabilities. For more information on increasing your company’s cyber security talk to our team and get started strengthening your cyber resilience.
