Making Your Business Cyber Resilient

With the rising threats from malware, phishing and high-tech threat actors, cybersecurity is top of mind for businesses of all sizes. To successfully mitigate the risks of becoming a victim, businesses need to have a strategic approach taking into account all the different areas of cybersecurity from prevention to recovery. 

Having a complete, thought out cyber security strategy, that is appropriate for your business, will not only provide peace of mind to you but will also give peace of mind to your clients, partners and employees when it comes to protecting their data. 

What is Cyber Resilience?

Cyber resilience is defined as the ability of a business to prepare for, respond to and recover from cyber attacks. It is a strategic way of looking at cybersecurity which allows businesses to continue to operate and serve their clients which includes prevention, detection, control and recovery.

Five areas of Cyber Resilience

There are five areas that need to be looked at and assessed in order to develop a framework to make a business cyber resilient.

1. Identify

Knowing what’s connected to what and which functions are critical is essential. Which assets are critical assets, systems and data and how do they interact with each other? Who supports them?

2. Protect

The goal with this step is having the appropriate security solutions and services to protect the environment and endpoints from potential threats.

3. Detect

This step requires the monitoring of your environment to detect out of the ordinary activity. The goal is to mitigate any potential data breaches before they occur.

4. Respond

This entails responding to a security breach. This is where having a solid cyber incident response plan is important because it allows the business to operate while the breach is being dealt with.

5. Recover

The last element of a good cyber resilience framework is recovering from an incident. This means restoring affected assets and the timely return to normal operations.

Benefits of Cyber Resiliency

There are many benefits to having a cyber resilient business. The main ones include:

• Maintaining the integrity of your business
• Enhanced system protection
• Enhanced trust from clients, partners and employees
• Reduced losses due to security breaches

Conclusion

While the scope of a cyber resilience framework will be vary depending on your business, the importance and benefits of having a cyber resilient business is important no matter the size. 

For most businesses the task of building such a framework can be daunting. Working with a trusted technology service provider can help build the framework, advise and recommend the right protection and detection solutions and services and help you execute your recovery plan when the need arises.

Contact your local MicroAge to discuss how we can help your business become cyber resilient.