Understanding the importance and benefits of cyber resilience

What is cyber resilience?

Cyber resilience is a set of structured guidelines designed to improve an organization’s ability to continuously deliver its intended business outcomes despite adverse cyber events.

These can include a breach, insider threat, ransomware attack or other disruptive event. When a business is cyber resilient, it maintains the confidence, integrity, and availability of their data to  withstand and recover from cyberattacks. 

If a data breach occurs, cyber resilient organizations can quickly recover their data and at scale. Cyber resilience—which brings together cyber security with Zero Trust principles, business continuity, cyber recovery, and organizational resilience strategies—is now a boardroom topic because threats continue to grow in number and severity. Companies are fortifying their organizations with data security and data management solutions that are both proactive and reactive to boost cyber resiliency.

Why is cyber resilience important?

Cyber resilience is important because enterprises—from commercial businesses to government agencies to educational and healthcare organizations—worldwide depend on data. 

On January 11, 2023 the unintentional deletion of files caused thousands of flights to be delayed across the United States. This is a good example of why cyber resilience is critical to enterprises’ operational stability. This sobering statistic is another. By 2031, it’s estimated that ransomware will attack every two seconds—costing its victims $265B annually.

To successfully operate, organizations’ structured and unstructured data must be properly identified, protected, and accessible only to authorized individuals. Cyber resilience helps ensure enterprises:

• Stay operational during an adverse event (e.g., a disaster, human error, ransomware attack, or insider threat) 
• Avoid unnecessary downtime  
• Maintain business continuity
• Keep data secure
• Stay in compliance with regulatory requirements
• Protect brand reputations
• Avoid paying ransom
• Detect and defend against attackers
• Recover rapidly and confidently should a ransomware attack succeed

What is a cyber resilience framework?

A cyber resilient security framework informs a security posture that supports the continuous delivery of intended outcomes when unfavorable cyber events happen. A cyber resilience framework will include:

• Security plans including data backup and malware detection capabilities
• Business continuity plans including recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives (RTOs/RPOs)
• Organizational resilience plans such as response team, communications leads, and executive sponsorship

A critical component of any cyber security resilience framework is alignment with Zero Trust security principles. By default, Zero Trust is a “never trust, always verify” security posture. Organizations following it know that devices should not be routinely and continuously trusted, even devices connected to a managed corporate network such as the corporate LAN and even if they were previously verified. Three principles underpin an effective Zero Trust architecture: 

• User/application authentication
• Device authentication
• Trust/don’t trust philosophy

A weak link in many organizations’ security strategy is how their unstructured data is organized, protected, and managed. Disparate policies, inconsistently implemented, across data sources, locations, and now multiple clouds create vulnerable data that is attractive to cybercriminals. A cyber resilience security strategy and framework defines security across IT systems and environments to prevent threat actors from accessing data. The best cyber resiliency frameworks include integrated cybersecurity capabilities to:

• Identify — Organizations need comprehensive visibility everywhere data resides and automation to proactively identify threats.
• Protect — Teams best safeguard their data with solutions that have robust security capabilities based on Zero Trust principles such as immutable snapshots, multifactor authentication, and granular role-based access.
• Detect — For enterprises, proactive detection starts with advanced technologies that can provide deep visibility in near-real time.
• Respond ­­— If systems are breached, organizations need a fast, effective way to restore systems and report the incident. 
• Recover — To get back to business quickly, teams require instant recovery at scale.

What are the key components of cyber resilience?

The key components of cyber resilience are cyber security with a foundation of Zero Trust principles, business continuity plans and processes, cyber recovery, and organizational resilience strategies and controls.

Enterprise survival depends on digital systems and infrastructure resilience, not just security. That’s because no matter how much companies invest in prevention, cybercriminals continue to adapt and create more potent, intrusive malware. Like a good sports team, organizations must have a comprehensive data security and management solution with effective offensive and defensive capabilities that protects all of their data sources because when prevention isn’t guaranteed, recovery is key to resilience.

What is cyber resilience vs cyber security?

Although extremely important, cybersecurity is only one element of a robust cyber resilience strategy. With cybersecurity capabilities, organizations can identify, protect, and detect threats such as ransomware or insider access credentials misuse. 

With a robust cyber resilience strategy, however, organizations can not only identify, protect, and detect ransomware and other threats, they can rapidly respond and recover to the threat without significant negative impact to their business outcomes.

Cyber resilience metrics

Across organizations, important cyber resilience metrics can include the:

• Frequency of specific operations such as conducting regular backups, scanning IT systems for vulnerabilities and threats, and patching antivirus software
• Robustness of access controls such as by role, seniority, authorizations, and more
• Recovery time objective (RTO) which is how long it takes until systems are back to normal
• Recovery point objective (RPO) which is how much data an organization can afford to lose before a restoration
• Number and types of integrations with leading security solution providers

TechTarget offers a cyber resilience assessment that can help organizations with questions to ask, including what to measure, when determining the robustness of your organization’s cyber resilience strategy.

Cohesity and cyber resilience

Organizations looking to strengthen cyber resilience can count on Cohesity. Teams using siloed point products for backup and recovery, disaster recovery, ransomware recovery, file and object services, and more inadvertently widen their attack surfaces. This can make it more difficult to protect data and systems when adverse events such as disasters, ransomware attacks, insider threats, and more occur. 

The Cohesity data cloud platform consolidates vulnerable infrastructure silos on a single, scalable, secure platform. It better protects data while enhancing security postures because it’s built on the principles of Zero Trust. With the Cohesity platform, organizations have a simpler way to:

• Identify — Cohesity delivers global visibility across environments and cyber vulnerability scanning to proactively detect threats.
• Protect — The Cohesity data security and management platform effectively safeguards data and reduces the risk of unauthorized access with immutable backup snapshots, immutable file system, encryption inflight and at rest, WORM (write once, read many), multifactor authentication, granular role-based access, and no service back door. Cohesity also features modern data isolation with cyber vaulting.
• Detect — Cohesity’s proactive approach to seeing and detecting attacks to stop encroachment includes machine learning (ML)-based anomaly detection, deep visibility of affected objects and sources, and real-time notifications and alerts. 
• Respond ­­— If systems are breached, Cohesity provides integration to security operations to alert security teams and leverage an organization’s established incident response process.  It also has a global CERT team to help organizations assess the health of backup data and aid in decisions about recovery points and includes built-in auditing and reporting as well as granular Active Directory comparison capabilities.
• Recover — To get back to business quickly after a ransomware attack or other adverse event, the Cohesity platform features instant recovery at scale for virtual machines (VMs) and non-disruptive instant large database recovery as well as the ability to recover anywhere to any point and to a recommended clean snapshot.

Additionally, for organizations looking to minimize both RTO and RPOs to keep pace in the 24/7 world of digital business, Cohesity unifies end-to-end data protection infrastructure—target storage, backup, replication, disaster recovery, and cloud tiering—for faster results.

Beyond fast, flexible backup data and system protection, preventing unauthorized access, stopping encroachment early, and supporting rapid recovery at scale, Cohesity boosts organizations’ cyber resilience through platform extensibility. The Cohesity platform is tightly integrated with leading security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) as well as security information event management (SIEM) solutions to accelerate discovery, investigation and remediation of ransomware attacks.  It also has an SDK and customizable management APIs for flexibility to address unique business requirements.