If cyber security refers to the processes and methods used to protect your organisation from a cyberattack, cyber resilience refers to your ability to deal with those threats.
An organisation’s ability to operate, function and recover from an attack determines upon its level of resilience. Although it is a relatively new term, cyber resilience has always been the intended outcome for cyber security.
Why cyber resilience is important
In the last 12 months, over four in ten businesses (43%) and two in ten charities (19%) have experienced a cybersecurity breach or attack, according to a survey carried out by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport. Alarmingly, less than three in ten businesses (27%) have a formal security policy in place.
In total, cyber security breaches have cost British businesses £30 billion since 2016– an astronomical figure that could have been reduced with better cyber resilience.
The fact is, that no organisation is immune to cyberattacks, so cyber resilience is an essential component of a sound security strategy. By recognising the importance of cyber resilience and deploying a cyber resilience programme, you can effectively:
- Deal with attacks
Organisations of all sizes are under a constant threat of cyberattacks, and cyber breaches can be absolutely devastating. Because of this, cyber resilience planning is essential. If a successful cyberattack happened to an organisation without a cyber resilience programme in place, damage and the delay to response times would be significantly increased.
- Improve system security
A cyber resilience programme does more than just enable you to respond to an attack and recover as quickly as possible. It helps you design and deliver security strategies and services across your IT infrastructure. By integrating cyber resilience into your existing infrastructure, you will boost security across the board and reduce the likelihood of cyberattacks’ success.
- Reduce the cost of a cyber attack
The reality is there is always going to be the risk of a successful cyberattack, regardless of how good an organisation’s preventative measures are. The cost of a data breach for large enterprises is over £1 million. For SMEs, it is usually over £100k. Furthermore, a successful cyberattack can cause a reputational damage to an organisation, which may lead to additional financial losses. If you minimise the impact a cyberattack has, you also minimise the cost it has.
Where to start with cyber resilience
The first step to good cyber resilience is understanding your organisation’s existing processes and standards and how they currently protect and serve you. Once you understand your processes’ and systems’ weaknesses, you can begin to integrate resilience into them. To use an analogy, you cannot bake a really great cake by throwing any mix of ingredients together, you need to know the ingredients and what you are doing with them.
The next steps are dependent on the above and include:
- the design and deployment of your resilience strategy and services across an organisation,
- minimising the damage from a cyberattack, and
- enabling prompt response and recovery.
Get yourself certified
You have got to take a professional, enterprise-level approach to make cyber resilience work, and that means committing to training and education.
As far as certification and training goes, we recommend cyber resilience RESILIA® certifications. There are two levels of certification available for professionals – Foundation and Practitioner and they are aimed at current and aspiring IT professionals. However, professionals from other functions with IT responsibilities would benefit greatly from the training as well.
Getting RESILIA®certified will give you the necessary knowledge and skills to be able to contribute or implement an effective cyber resilience across your organisation.
In today’s highly digitalised world, there is no better way to stay on top. Cyber resilience skills are in demand as more organisations take a resilience-based approach to security. The traditional security approach of prevention first is being replaced with a more comprehensive one where attack response is treated with equal importance. Therefore, a high value is placed on people with the right skills to deploy such strategies.
