5 Tips for Building a Cyber Resilience Strategy

You’ve spent endless time, money, and resources to secure your infrastructure. You have all the right malware detection, encryption, and firewalls in place. But when a cyber-attack inevitably hits, will your business be able to function in the aftermath?

The key to quickly bouncing back from a breach or attack is a cyber resilience strategy. But only 30% of businesses have one in place. In this blog, we’ll discuss five tips for building a bulletproof cyber resilience strategy.

Cybersecurity & Cyber Resilience. What's the Difference?

Cybersecurity refers to the methods, processes, and tactics you use to protect your data and systems. It includes implementing technology and best practices to secure your infrastructure and prevent hackers from gaining access.

Cyber resilience is your organization’s ability to withstand, respond to, and recover from a cyber-attack or data breach. The goal of cyber resilience is to maintain the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data and business operations.

Cybersecurity and cyber resilience are intricately connected – and equally important. You can no longer wonder if a cyberattack will happen to your business, but rather when. In fact, 50% of small businesses have experienced a data breach or attack. And less than 20% feel confident in their ability to identify and guard against cyberattacks. You need to focus on making your IT systems resilient to attacks instead of purely trying to prevent them.

How to Build a Cyber Resilience Strategy

A cyber resilience strategy should encompass security, data protection, business continuity, and end-user empowerment. Your cyber resilience plan should fulfill three goals. In the event of an attack or breach:

• Your business needs to stay functional

• End-users need the ability to access the resources required for their jobs

• You need fast search and e-discovery capabilities to meet regulatory compliance and government requirements

Follow these five tips to build a thorough cyber resilience plan.

1. Get Management on Board

Despite published evidence that cyber risks are increasing, cyber resilience is not taken seriously enough. IT managers often have trouble communicating with business leaders about security problems facing the business. So, how do describe the need for further security measures to business Leaders in your organization? Clearly define the risk and scope of the problem to the board. Demonstrate how costly cyber threats can be to your reputation, intellectual property, and revenue.

Getting sign-off from business leaders isn’t always easy. Need to improve your presentation and negotiating skills? We have you covered. Our Workplace Fundamentals series  includes classes like Negotiation Skills,  Communication Strategies, and  Presentation Skills, to increase your confidence when speaking to your leadership team.

2. Involve Your Entire Organization

Cyber resilience education should be part of your core business process. Not everyone has to be a security expert, but everyone should be educated, engaged, and involved in incident planning and response. Employees in every department, from accounting and HR to other technical roles, should understand security and how it impacts their job roles. If they don’t do their part to protect data on company servers and personal devices, a cyber-attack can demobilize your entire business.

Here are some ways to involve your entire organization in your cyber resilience strategy:

• Make security training a business requirement for all new employees

• Talk to employees in every department to gain insight into their operations, processes, and security concerns

• Conduct ongoing security awareness activities for all employees, several times per year

Our recommended course: CyberSAFE (Securing Assets for the End User). In this course, students will identify many of the common risks involved in using conventional end-user technology, as well as ways to use it safely, and how to protect their organization from those risks.  View the CyberSAFE course outline here.

3. Back Up Your Data Regularly

Having a separate and safe copy of your data is essential. Store regular, detailed data backups on a separate network so you can restore compromised data quickly if an attack occurs. Automatic daily backups are ideal, but you should back up your data at least once a week.

4. Implement Backup Solutions

If downtime occurs, you need to be prepared to quickly and seamlessly switch to a backup service. Having a thorough backup available mitigates the effects of a breach by enabling your employees to continue working and accessing the tools they need to do their job.

5. Simulate Security Incidents

Simulate a company-wide security incident at least once per year. Run through the steps your business will take in the event of a breach or attack—from how you’ll contain a potential breach to notifying law enforcement, customers, and investors.

Simulate the actions you’ll take to:

• Categorize and classify the type of attack

• Contain the impact

• Investigate the root cause

• Rectify the issue and return the business to a stable state

Iron out any kinks in your process during the practice run so you aren’t caught off guard in a real-world situation. When a breach hits, having a foolproof cyber resilience plan will help your employees stay calm and confident while you mitigate the threat.

What Can Your Company Do If You Encounter a Data Breach or Cyber-Attack?

Ideally, you are able to acquire as much information about the attack as possible. Examining the crime, looking for footprints, and utilizing computer forensics tools are crucial. Cyber forensic skills are often overlooked in favor of cyber-defense skills, however, they are equally as important, and lacking them could prove incredibly costly if lawsuits are a potential possibility. United Training is an EC-Council Authorized Learning Partner and cyber forensics is a major area of focus for EC-Council. Check out their Computer Hacking Forensic Investigator (CHFI) and Certified Threat Intelligence Analyst (CTIA) classes for more information.

Additional Information Security Training Solutions

Being properly trained and informed is no longer exclusively for IT and Cybersecurity Professionals. Instead, it is now the responsibility of everyone in an organization to have at minimum a foundational understanding of security issues and vulnerabilities. At United Training, we are on the cutting-edge of cybersecurity with training programs designed to ensure that your organization can best prevent itself against attacks and, should one occur, significantly reduce your risk and increase your response time.

View our entire lineup of Cybersecurity learning solutions.

Some Closing Thoughts

Investing in cyber resilience today will prepare your organization to withstand future attacks and preserve your business reputation and bottom line when a breach occurs. The best investment you can make in cyber resilience is training. Dedicating staff time to proper cyber security training underscores the importance of security across your organization and arms employees to detect and communicate suspicious activity.