The prospect of a cyber attack on your business can be worrisome, but with an effective cyber resilience strategy, these worries can be reduced. The only question is: how does cyber resilience work and how would it benefit your business?
Cyber resilience works when companies build an effective strategy to protect itself from, detect, respond to and recover from cyber attacks. Doing so means that the impact of an attack should have less of an impact on the business, its finances and operations.
Read on to learn more about cyber resilience, what a resilient IT system looks like and how to achieve cyber resilience with NEBRC.
What is Cyber Resilience?
Cyber resilience is the ability of a business to protect itself from, detect, respond to and recover from cyber attacks. Being resilient means that the impact of an attack should be reduced, with a stronger likelihood of operations continuing, or resuming, faster.
Why is Cyber Resilience Important?
It’s important that businesses become cyber resilient as attackers are getting smarter every day. Whilst a business can’t necessarily prepare for every possible type of attack, being resilient means that they can adapt in unknown crises. It also ensures business continuity with little-to-no downtime in the face of threats, adverse and challenging conditions.
What Makes a Resilient IT System?
There are four characteristics that make up a basic resilient IT system. A good system will build on this, however, to consider the people and processes involved.
- Prepare: whilst cyber resilience is largely a responsive strategy, it is still important to take measures to prevent cyber attacks from happening.
- Detect: you can take every preventative measure possible, but a cyber attack may still happen. Early detection is key to limit the damage caused and segregating your system can reduce the risk of major failures.
- Recover: accepting that an incident is occuring doesn’t always come naturally and people don’t always react as expected. Therefore communication and having the right people in the right roles is critical for good recovery.
- Adapt: systems need to be able to adapt in the face of challenging situations. This is what differentiates a resilient system from a robust system, and will make all the difference if challenged,
What are the Benefits of Cyber Resilience?
Whilst cyber resilience should help to reduce the impact of cyber attacks overall, there are a few key benefits to achieving resilience:
Mitigates Financial Loss
Depending on the type of cyber attack, it could cause financial loss. This could be as simple as operations downtime, or as severe as a data breach. The 2024 Cyber Security Breaches Survey estimates that the single most disruptive breach from the last 12 months cost each business, of any size, an average of approximately £1,205. Cyber resilience may have reduced the impact that it had. For medium-sized businesses, this increased to £10,830 and for charities, this figure was approximately £460.
Gains Customer Trust and Loyalty
Some industries require stronger compliance with international standards than others. However some businesses choose to comply with such standards as a means of showcasing their trustworthiness and reputability.
An example of this is the Cyber Essentials certification which helps SMEs to benchmark their security against five key areas. Research shows that if the correct measures are taken in line with these five key areas, it can protect against some cyber attacks.
For larger businesses, the ISO/IEC 27001 by the International Organisation for Standardisation may be more appropriate. This standard provides conditions for an information security management system (ISMS) for managing information such as employee details, financial information, intellectual property or third-party entrusted information. Another consideration is IASME cyber assurance which can be a great stepping stone to ISO 27001 for SMEs https://iasme.co.uk/iasme-cyber-assurance/
Increases Competitive Advantage
A business that has cyber resilience naturally has competitive advantage over those that don’t. Put yourself in the shoes of a potential customer. Which business would you choose to work with? One that has strong IT processes and systems in place for cyber resilience, or a business that simply hopes that they won’t be attacked (or assumes that they won’t).
Learn more about the benefits of cyber resilience in our dedicated blog.
How to Achieve Cyber Resilience
Achieving cyber resilience isn’t a simple, one-size-fits-all strategy. It can be difficult to build a strategy that covers all of the risks to a business. But, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. Here are our top four tips for achieving cyber resilience.
- Analyse the risks – a cyber resilience strategy should outline the potential risks to a business and should describe ways to mitigate them.
- Prioritise business goals – after analysing the risks, a business needs to review this in relation to their business goals. How will they respond to threats that impact these goals? Create a business continuity plan and test it with all staff review regulating. It is also important to keep a printed copy at home.
- Minimise the impact – a business continuity plan should be created and tested with all staff in order to minimise the impact of an attack. A printed copy of the final plan should be kept off-site in case of major systems failure.
- Ongoing iterations – no plan is perfect and it’s unlikely that a business can plan for every eventuality, which is why ongoing iterations to a cyber resilience plan is essential.
Build Cyber Resilience with NEBRC
At NEBRC, we work with you in a controlled environment to explore any weaknesses in your systems and provide cost-effective solutions to help secure your business from attack.
With continued guidance and support from our specialist team, we’ll support you throughout your journey to keep your business safe.
Why not take a look at our cyber security policy review service to see how we can upgrade your strategy. Or, if you’re unsure about your company’s vulnerabilities, check out our business vulnerability assessments. Alternatively, contact us today for tailored solutions to your cyber security needs and concerns.
You can also sign up for our FREE Core Membership, designed to provide you with relevant resources and ongoing support to improve your resilience to cyber security threats.