Network Security
Vulnerability Management
Privileged Access Management
Endpoint Security
Threat Hunting
Unified Endpoint Management
Email & Collaboration Security
Contents:
As careful as we are in our cybersecurity strategy, and as up-to-date as we struggle to be nowadays, the imminence of an incident can’t be denied. In 2021 the number of cyberattacks per company grew by 30% since the previous year, as shown by an Accenture report. A sort of cyberattack will affect you, you can’t dodge it!
The difference for you, your employees, your business, and your business partners, relies on how deep this probable cyberattack will go, how disruptive it will be for your work, and how fast and complete you will bounce back, meanwhile dealing with the after waves of such an event.
This is where the Cyber Resilience Strategy comes into discussion, not only as a set of tools, but mostly as a work ethic that should infuse in all areas of your company.
Building resilience in cybersecurity is a major help not only in facing hackers but for any major disruptive event that you can’t anticipate, but you can prepare for. This includes medical crises – like the Covid19 pandemic, when you had to implement secure work-from-home measures -, world peace crises – like the Ukrainian war, whit hackers trying to penetrate important economic arias on both sides -, social or financial crises, and natural disasters.
These examples show that Cyber Resilience Strategy has become a global matter. As businesses have expanded their reach, the supply chain goes wider and wider, and your products and services touch far-away markets, all these make your business more vulnerable to multiple-area disruptions.
The Definition of Cyber Resilience Strategy
The Cyber Resilience Strategy is a carefully designed architecture that gives your business the ability to protect itself from, detect, respond to and recover from cyberattacks.
Resilience in cyber security is dependent on multiple operational activities, like business continuity, disaster recovery, incident response, and cybersecurity plans.
The main goal for resilient organizations is to lessen the impact of a successful cyberattack and continue to operate effectively. You can achieve this by paying attention to the interrelationship between your cybersecurity tools and how they work together, complementing each other. To be cyber resilient means to see them as part of a functional organism, not as separate silos.
An organization that is cyber resilient can adapt to known and unknown crises, dangers, difficult situations, and obstacles.
Cyber Resilience Strategy Framework
Cyber Resilience Strategy is built on the idea that no matter how well you will secure your company, an attack will happen.
A Cyber Resilience Framework offers you a flexible approach to managing your risks, getting to acknowledge and address them. Each area should be aligned with existing cybersecurity laws and regulations, and it is essential to understand how all these elements work together.
Cyber Resilience Strategy is a step through the maturity of your company’s cybersecurity.
1. Protection
To build a strong Cyber Resilience Strategy your first, and most important, step is to manage the defense of your information, processes and infrastructures by taking important security measures.
This may include:
- Asset administration
- Policies governing information security
- Physical and environmental safety
- Identity and access management
- Malware defense
- Patch and configuration management
- Encryption
- System safety
- Security of networks and communications
- Security knowledge and training
- Staff education and awareness
- Comprehensive risk management strategy
- Risk management in the supply chain
2 Detection
The second step is the detection of anomalies, flaws and potential security dangers (ideally before they can create any trouble). To do this it is necessary on-the-clock surveillance of networks, systems and endpoints.
This may include:
- Knowledge of dangers and flaws
- Security observation
3 Respons & Recovery
The Cyber Resilience Strategy framework includes planning a quick and efficient response in case of an incident and the fastest recovery of your usual processes.
This may include:
- Planning an incident response
- Managing the continuity of ICT (information and communication technology)
- Business continuity planification
4 Administration involvement
This implies the integration of cyber resilience measures in the day-to-day process and activities of the company under C-level supervision.
This may include:
- Programs for formal information security
- Improvement processes
- Internal & External audit and certification
- C-level participation
- Administration structures and processes
Why Do You Need a Cyber Resilience Plan?
Being cyber resilient will help you not only in the security field but is also a badge of honor that will be acknowledged by your customers and business partners.
Quickly adapting to never-ending changes that are now the new normal will help you in the long run for stability and perhaps even for existence.
A Cyber Resilience Strategy will help you:
- Financially: by reducing the risks, you reduce the financial loss. Keep in mind that most of cyberattacks represent a money drainer for the victim. Besides that, the longer your company’s procedures and systems are down because of an incident, the more money you lose. Cybercrime is expected to cost businesses worldwide $10.5 trillion per year by 2025, according to Cybersecurity Ventures.
- To gain trust: meeting international standards in cybersecurity will win the trust of your employees, partners, customers, suppliers and so on. For example, the ISO/IEC 27001 offers a standard for an information security management system (ISMS), or the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS), in the U.S., a precondition for processing credit card payments.
- Be competitive: by showing cyber resilience, you show commitment, a well-thought business plan and vision. All these will give you a competitive advantage over companies that can’t guarantee that they will be in business if a crisis shows up.
- Built your brand: don’t underestimate the power of brand and reputation. A data leak could tarnish years of good work making you a pariah among other businesses. Remember that some companies never fully recovered after a serious hacking attack.
How to Implement a Cyber Resilience Strategy?
All these may seem a lot at a first glance, and you may wonder how to properly include every component of the Cyber Resilience Plan in your workflow, cybersecurity layers, and IT procedures.
But there are a few steps that you can take inside your company to achieve cyber resilience:
1 Collect insights
Get your organization’s senior leaders’ input, they will know what the most important business activities to manage are and on what your plan should focus.
2 Determine which are the most important operational activities
Get to know those activities essential for creating your product/service. To achieve this goal, you can do a business impact analysis (BIA). This will not only pinpoint the critical processes, people, technologies and resources for your business, but it will show you the potential impact on the organization if an incident disrupts them or shot them down altogether.
This is the moment to identify the resilience components of your business, the ones that are a priority to recover in case of a cyberattack and will help you to bounce back faster.
3 Analise risks
It is most important to be aware of the weaknesses and vulnerabilities in your organization’s cybersecurity, as well as the most likely internal and external threats.
4 Prevent attacks
Although the entire Cyber Resilience Strategy is in place especially for the moment when an attack hits your organization, you should take measures to prevent such an event as well as you can.
After identifying the weaknesses of your organization, is time to take measures to minimize the possibility of them being used against you by installing software, educating employees, making backup copies and so on.
5 Plan! Plan! Plan!
After having learned all the data and built up all the cybersecurity walls, it is time to plan your steps in case of an incident so you can return to normal in no time. This way you will know what matters to address first and in what way.
6 Availability
Make sure that operational documents and components are available in a crisis. That all these are stored in a secure online location and your employees can reach them.
7 Stay up to date
Once all your cybersecurity procedures are set up, be sure you test and update them regularly. The same goes for your software that needs constant patching.
How Can Heimdal® Help?
Built the Cyber Resilience Strategy of your firm by using cybersecurity products that work well together and cover all the attack surface.
Heimdal Threat Prevention is a DNS traffic-filtering solution that makes sure malware doesn’t set foot in your endpoints.
Next-Gen Endpoint Antivirus has four layers of impeccable detection powered by Heimdal™ Security’s unique intelligence, which will help you detect and mitigate even the most complex threats.
Heimdal Patch & Asset Management, its automatic patching, and updating engine keeps all your apps and software up to date, regardless of the machine’s status, time zone, or package size. The updating/patching module also allows your system admin to deploy proprietary software on all the machines.
Heimdal Privileged Access Management, our Privileged Access Management (PAM) solution will help you increase your UA hygiene and take full control of what goes on inside your machine. This is the only PAM solution on the market that automatically de-escalates user rights on threat detection.
Heimdal® DNS Security Solution
- Machine learning powered scans for all incoming online traffic;
- Stops data breaches before sensitive info can be exposed to the outside;
- Advanced DNS, HTTP and HTTPS filtering for all your endpoints;
- Protection against data leakage, APTs, ransomware and exploits;
Wrapping Up…
It is no longer an option to hope you will be lucky enough and don’t get hit by a cyberattack ever. Nor it is possible to see your cybersecurity as a “once and done” task. You need a Cyber Resilience Strategy to remain competitive and survive on this bumpy road called today’s global market.
Achieving resilience in cyber security will positively impact your whole business, ensuring a good collaboration between several arias of the company and maintaining everything up-to-date.
Effective cyber resilience must be done at all levels of the company and is a risk-based strategy, a proactive approach on threats, vulnerabilities, and the consequences for critical data and supporting assets.
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