Why Cyber Resilience is Critically Important
It’s no longer sufficient for IT staff to deploy a security infrastructure, then go on to other projects. Sadly, security incidents aren’t exceptions anymore. Instead, they’ve become the norm.
Cybersecurity has become a never-ending process of responding to a vulnerability, a breach, a threat or attack, smacking it down, then moving on to the next one – much like a game of Whac-A-Mole played at the highest speed. It should be noted that the gamer, or the enterprise in this case, is always going to be one step behind the mole, or the threat.
It has become a post-breach world where the next security incident has probably already infiltrated the network.
As a result, it can seem like security teams are always reacting, or always trying to play catch up. That’s where cyber resilience comes in.
Cyber resiliency means that the infrastructure can withstand threats, and security teams can trust in the systems to mitigate vulnerabilities and malicious acts automatically. To achieve cyber resilience, IT needs to move from a model that is inflexible, static and impractical to one that is adaptive, dynamic and realistic. In other words, reshaping cybersecurity into security that works.
Basics of Cyber Resilience
There are literally thousands of articles on cyber-resilience; we found a particularly good series (though a little dated) over at MITRE.org. Almost universally, the writers recommend four basic steps toward resilience:
- Map all assets connected to the network including cloud-based assets and services, then determine which of them are essential for critical business processes. For example, enterprise resource planning (ERP) may not be considered vital during an attack, while sales order processing most probably will be. Cross-organizational inputs can help identify the criticalities.
- Identify the potential vectors that hackers can use for attacks against the business processes you’ve classified as critical. It’s absolutely essential to understand how these processes could be disrupted, right down to the smallest details like a poorly secured IoT device that can act as an entry point into a server, for example.
- This step leverages the assessment and analysis of the previous steps to develop response plans that will address potential failure scenarios. Security technologies like eXtended Detection and Response (XDR) can play a role in this step; they allow admins to define playbooks to automatically orchestrate security responses across multiple other solutions like NGFWs and WAFs. Any response plan, though, should also include high-level strategic planning for attacks like ransomware to avoid losing precious time to decision paralysis when a payment is demanded.
- The final step is to repeat the three previous phases on a routine basis, assessing and monitoring your infrastructure continuously and constantly improving the security of the infrastructure.
If this all sounds like an enormous undertaking, why yes, it can be, depending on the size and complexity of your network and number and distribution of assets. However, a relatively new technology utilizing a similar step by step process can help make the experience far more accurate and manageable.
If this information is helpful to you read our blog for more interesting and useful content, tips and guildelines on similar topics. Contact the team of COMPUTER 2000 Bulgaria now if you have a specific question. Our specialists will be asiisting you with your query.
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