Cyber resilience means staying operational in the face of setbacks and challenges. To unpack it a little more, it’s really about continuing on in the face of cyberattacks, natural disasters, or negative macroeconomic forces. As much as anything else, this means being prepared for these events to enable quick recovery. Good cyber resilience planning assumes challenges are inevitable and examines all the ways an organisation can be as ready for them as possible so that, when they do happen, they cause minimal damage.
Why Is Cyber Resilience Important?
Cyber resilience is the ability of an organisation to prepare for, respond to, and recover from cyber attacks, ensuring continuity of operations despite adverse events. Cyber resilience allows companies to keep going in the face of challenges. With ransomware on the rise, being able to stay resilient in the face of cyber threats has become essential for any company’s survival.
More specifically, when done right, cyber resilience protects against:
- Financial risk, by helping companies either avoid or recover much more quickly from data breaches, which now cost an average of $4.45 million per incident.
- Reputational damage, by making sure enterprises continue to protect both customer and employee data.
- Loss of competitive advantage, by paving the way for easier digital transformation because IT teams don’t have to devote as much time or resources to cybersecurity.
When combined, all three advantages could be the difference between failing and thriving for any type of company.
Key Components of Cyber Resilience
All cyber resilience strategies should have the following components:
1. Cybersecurity
Cybersecurity is a primary component of cyber resilience. Safeguarding your IT infrastructure—including your networks, hardware, and data—is essential for monitoring, detecting, and responding to potential threats and breaches.
2. Risk assessment
Identifying potential risks to your IT environment is also very important for any cyber resilience strategy. These risks encompass various threats such as hacking, data breaches, and espionage, as well as vulnerabilities stemming from human error, hardware malfunctions, natural calamities, and power disruptions.
3. Continuity planning
Business continuity is an organisation's capability to sustain operations and service delivery in the aftermath of a disruptive incident. Given the unprecedented challenges posed by recent events, enterprises are revisiting and enhancing their continuity plans to address existing limitations and develop more robust resilience strategies.
4. Recovery
Recovery, more specifically, disaster recovery, entails a comprehensive framework of procedures, tools, and policies aimed at restoring essential functions following a significant disruption. Whether triggered by a cyberattack, prolonged power outage, or natural disaster, these recovery measures are indispensable for minimizing downtime and restoring normalcy swiftly.
Cyber Resilience Best Practices
In addition to including all four of the above components, there are certain things organisations can do to ensure effective cyber resilience.
First, they should assign a person or team to lead the cyber resilience strategy and create specific metrics around what success for that team looks like. For example, establish a timeline within which you need the team to complete the cyber resilience plan.
There should also be very clear metrics around what “good” or “successful” cyber resilience looks like for your company This will vary depending on your particular industry, products, and services, but your goal may be to recover within a certain amount of time from a data breach, for example, or to prevent data breaches altogether.
And finally, the plan itself will need to delicately balance ROI versus risk. That is, it must determine if cost-effective prevention is viable and find a good balance between preventative, detective, and corrective control.
Best Data Platform for Cyber Resilience
Cyber resilience involves many facets and technologies, but a fundamental technology for any cyber resilience plan is a powerful, flexible data platform that lets you future-proof your data storage and management.
Pure Storage enables organisations to minimize business risks by surpassing all expectations for performance, business continuity, and reliability.
Pure Storage provides:
- Guaranteed data availability via proactively managed SLAs to ensure 99.9999% uptime
- Ransomware resiliency
- Optimised performance via intelligent, AI-driven quality of service
- Zero downtime via 24x7x365 predictive support that proactively ensures problems are addressed before they can impact your business
- On-demand disaster recovery as a service
- Reliable all-flash for every use case
- 24x7 resilience via our proactive technical team detecting and resolving 80% of issues before they affect users, which leads to 30 times fewer service calls
Learn more about why Pure Storage is the best data platform for cyber resilience.
