While the number of attempted cyber attacks is constantly growing, many businesses aren’t well equipped to deal with them and aren’t sure how building cyber resilience can help. We’ve created this guide to help you understand the benefits of cyber resilience.
So what are the benefits of cyber resilience? The top benefits of cyber resilience are:
- Reduced Risk of Economic Impact
- Faster Recovery Time
- Ensuring Compliance
- Increased Customer Confidence
- Ongoing Business Continuity
These are all important factors to make sure that your business runs smoothly, even in the event of a cyber attack.
Read on to find out more about the top 5 benefits of cyber resilience and how to build your business’s cyber resilience.
What Are the 5 Benefits of Cyber Resilience?
Despite the ongoing frequency and sophistication of cyber attacks, many organisations are still unprepared to handle them. A cyber resilience strategy will enable your organisation to protect against oncoming attacks, mitigate the outcomes, and ensure a speedy recovery. Here are the top 5 benefits of a strong cyber resilience strategy.
Reduced Risk of Economic Impact
A breach or cyber attack can be costly for many businesses, with the average cost of the breach increasing with the size of the business. In 2022, the average cost of a successful attack or breach was £3,270. These costs come from a wide variety of outcomes, such as staff downtime while losing access to data, repair or recovery costs, loss of share value, or even ransom payments.
On top of the cost of dealing with the breach, companies that fail to maintain a well thought out cyber resilience strategy could be liable for massive fines. The maximum fine for a data breach in the UK is £17.5 million, or 4% of the organisation’s annual global turnover, whichever is larger. While not all data breaches result in a fine, those that neglect their duty to protect customer data are at risk of being penalised.
Faster Recovery Time
By having a detailed plan in place, you can speed up the recovery process by ensuring that all of your employees know their roles and responsibilities and can perform them effectively.
Time is of the essence when dealing with a cyber incident, and the process of dealing with a cyber attack can become even more chaotic than usual if you aren’t adequately prepared.
Ensures Compliance
As a business, it is your responsibility to protect your customer’s data in an appropriate way. Businesses that fail to comply with GDPR regulations could receive fines, penalties, and lawsuits.
Through building a strong cyber resilience strategy, you should cover all compliance laws and identify any risks associated with them. This will ensure that your business is protected against legal repercussions in the event of a breach.
Increased Customer Confidence
With online privacy in the forefront of your customer’s minds, a poorly managed cyber incident can irreversibly damage your company’s reputation. A strong cyber resilience strategy will reassure your customers that you are serious about protecting their data, and will allow other businesses to be confident that you’re safe to work with.
Ongoing Business Continuity
A good cyber resilience strategy will improve the overall sustainability of your business and mitigate threats before they can cause damage. The response plan will help reduce the risk and minimise the impact that cyber security threats can have on your business. This ensures that your organisation can thrive for years to come.
How Do You Build Cyber Resilience?
Building cyber resilience can be difficult. With so many different possibilities for strategies and so many different types of threat, how do you make one strategy to cover them all? We made this list of our 4 steps for building a cyber resilience strategy to help you begin your cyber resilience journey. For more help, see our Cyber Security Policy Review service, or get in touch to find out more.
Analyse Risks
A cyber resilience strategy should outline all potential risks and describe mitigations for each of them. This should include things like what information could be targeted, what vulnerabilities does the organisation have, how likely it is to happen, and what can be done to reduce the likelihood.
Unsure what threats are out there? Read our guide on the techniques that hackers use to steal information.
Prioritise Your Business Goals
After analysing the risks, you should define your business goals and list your top priorities. From this, you can also analyse what you can do to realistically achieve them. This section should also include what you can achieve in response to a cyber incident.
Maintain a Cyber Resilience Strategy
Maintaining a strong strategy includes outlining the steps you need to take to minimise the impact of a breach and ensure that the business can continue to operate. This can include things like how to stop the attack, how your employees can continue working without access to systems, and how to respond in the aftermath of the attack.
Ongoing Iterations
One of the most important aspects of a good cyber resilience strategy is continually updating your strategy. The types of threats that businesses face are continually evolving, so you need to too.
Reviewing your strategy on a regular basis also means that everyone at the company knows their role in the event of an attack. This is essential to ensure a fast response time and reduce the overall impact of the incident.
Consistently training your employees is one of the key steps of business resilience. For more information, read our guide on the purpose of cyber security awareness.
Building Cyber Resilience With North East Business Resilience Centre
We work with you in a controlled environment to explore any flaws and weaknesses in your systems and provide cost-effective solutions to help secure your business from any type of 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 sign up to our free core membership to keep up to date with the latest cyber security matters and keep your business safe online.