Organizations now are having an urgent need to harden their defenses with the increase in cyberattacks on enterprises by 42% in the last year. The growing threat actor sophistication and the increasing attack surface make enterprise cyber resilience the most important in history. The blog explores what cyber resilience means, its frameworks, strategies, and best practices to help organizations have robust defenses against evolving threats.
What is Enterprise Cyber Resilience?
To ensure your company has the best-in-class cyber resilience it’s important to have an idea about why is it required un the first place.
Objective of Cyber Resilience
Cyber resilience is used to help the organization prepare for, respond to, and recover from the cyberattacks on its critical operations. Unlike conventional cybersecurity, this approach focuses more on enduring and adapting than on preventing a disruption.
Key Components of Cyber Resilience
- Cyber Defense: Strengthening the organization's capacity to prevent attacks.
- Incident Response: Managing and reducing the impact of attacks.
- Continuous Monitoring: Proactive detection of vulnerabilities and threats.
- Business Processes: Integration of resilience in the routine daily processes.
Current State of Cyber Resilience: Challenges and Trends
Here’s a breakdown of all that cyber resilience is facing today with the upcoming trends paving its way.
What is the State of Cyber Security and Resilience Today?
- Savvy Actors: Ransomware and even nation-state attackers are becoming a common threat.
- Regulatory demands: Cyber resilience standards, the NIST cybersecurity framework, amongst others, call for increased complexity in compliance.
- Attacker's Enlarged Access Surface: There is an enlarging attack surface associated with cloud-based technologies and devices of the internet of things.
New Trends You Should Know About
- Cyber Resilience Solutions: End points are investing in detection and response, SIEM, and machine learning driven threat detection.
- Cybersecurity Maturity Model: Companies are implementing structured methodologies for analyzing and strengthening their security.
Cyber Resilience Framework Building
Let us now see how you can build your own cyber resilience framework and what are the things you should keep in mind.
Cyber Resilience Assessment
An effective framework requires a robust cyber resilience assessment. This is inclusive of the following:
- Evaluation of Security Measures: Analyzing current defenses and access control systems.
- Identify Threats: Conduct threat hunting and risk management exercises.
- Cyber Resilience Maturity Levels: Use a cyber resilience maturity model to measure readiness.
Cyber Resilience Assessment Framework
- Identify Threats: Advanced threat detection tools.
- Risk Mitigation: Risk prioritization by impact.
- Incident Response Plan: Structured plan for attack detection and response.
- Cybersecurity Maturity Model: Companies are implementing structured methodologies for analyzing and strengthening their security.
Steps by Step to Create a Cyber Resilience Plan for Your Enterprise
Developing an effective cyber resilience plan requires the following critical steps:
1. Run a Vulnerability Assessment:
- Conduct regular vulnerability assessments to identify system and network weaknesses.
- Utilize endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools for real-time vulnerability monitoring.
2. Improve Threat Detection and Response:
- Invest in advanced threat detection solutions using machine learning.
- Continuously train security analysts to identify, analyze, and neutralize threats.
- Establish quick incident response protocols to minimize potential damage.
3. Create a Compliant Specific Cyber Resilience Policy:
- Create a formalized policy that defines roles, responsibilities, and incident response procedures.
- Ensure the policy aligns with the standards that are recognized, like the NIST cyber resilience framework, to meet regulatory compliance and consistency.
4. Ensure Business Continuity
- Create backup and recovery mechanisms to safeguard critical data and systems.
- Implement redundancy in critical infrastructure to maintain operations during disruptions.
- Test business continuity plans through drills and simulations on a regular basis.
5. Keep up with Monitoring and Improvement
- Continuously monitor security postures using advanced tools and techniques.
- Keep the cyber resilience plan current by updating it according to emerging threats and changes in business processes.
- Instill a culture of continuous improvement by bringing into the system lessons learned from past incidents and best practices in the industry.
Cyber Resilience Best Practices for Enterprise
Strengthening Postures
Improve cyber resiliency, and the right best practices implemented by enterprises:
- Use Advanced EDR: Let advanced EDR tools monitor for at endpoints, then detect and neutralize ransomware and malware as a robust endpoint barrier.
- Access Control: Strict access-control policies limit the end-users’ access and ensure that everybody accesses appropriate data based on their role or responsibility. In most cases, insiders are not responsible for malicious activities inside the organization or even unauthorized activities.
- Pro-level Threat Defense: Use machine learning to detect and prevent sophisticated attacks ahead of the threat actors.
- Real-time Monitoring: Monitor systems and networks in real time to detect vulnerabilities before they are exploited.
Strengthening Postures
Improve cyber resiliency, and the right best practices implemented by enterprises:
- Use Advanced EDR: Let advanced EDR tools monitor for at endpoints, then detect and neutralize ransomware and malware as a robust endpoint barrier.
- Access Control: Strict access-control policies limit the end-users’ access and ensure that everybody accesses appropriate data based on their role or responsibility. In most cases, insiders are not responsible for malicious activities inside the organization or even unauthorized activities.
- Pro-level Threat Defense: Use machine learning to detect and prevent sophisticated attacks ahead of the threat actors.
- Real-time Monitoring: Monitor systems and networks in real time to detect vulnerabilities before they are exploited.
Improvement of Employee Education and Training
Human mistake is the greatest threat to any enterprise in cybersecurity. The following should be carried out:
- Employee Education: Training on recognizing phishing, social engineering, etc. on an almost daily basis
- Threat Scenario Simulations: Training by conducting simulated threat scenarios. Conduct drills/simulations and put the employee under stress tests.
- Security Culture: Create in the organization an actual security culture through ensuring not to wait; employees are equipped with the prerogative power to raise a panic alarm immediately.
Collaboration is the foundation of a strong cyber resilience framework:
- Industry Partnerships: Join industry groups and share threat intelligence to stay informed about the latest attack vectors and defense mechanisms.
- Compliance: Practice according to established standards, such as the NIST cyber resilience framework, to fulfill regulatory and industry standards.
- Incident Response Coordination: Coordinate with external security experts and law enforcement to effectively respond to and mitigate major cybersecurity incidents.
Benefits of a Cybersecurity Maturity Model
1. Structured Roadmap
- Pain Point: Many organizations struggle with an unstructured approach to enhancing their cybersecurity, resulting in inefficiencies and protection gaps.
- Solution: The maturity model offers a clear roadmap with step-by-step objectives, facilitating organized and measurable advancements over time.
- Impact: Teams can effectively prioritize their efforts, beginning with fundamental controls and progressively evolving towards more comprehensive, adaptive cybersecurity strategies.
Example: A startup transitions from basic access controls to a zero-trust architecture, following the guidance of the maturity model.
2. Vulnerability Assessment
- Pain Point: Detecting vulnerabilities and weaknesses within intricate IT environments can be quite difficult.
- Solution: The maturity model enables a thorough assessment of current systems and processes, highlighting areas that require improvement.
- Impact: Organizations can efficiently tackle vulnerabilities, thereby lowering their risk of exposure to threats.
Example: A manufacturing firm employs the maturity model to uncover vulnerabilities in outdated firmware, allowing them to implement updates proactively and prevent potential breaches.
3. Regulatory Compliance
- Pain Point: A firm has challenges in staying updated with changing industrial standards and legal requirements as their expertise is usually limited.
- Solution: It aids the organizations by including established guidelines such as NIST or ISO 27001 while using the model.
- Impact: Reduced chance of penalties from fines for non-compliance and building stakeholder’s trust.
Example: A financial organization aligns its processes to maturity by ensuring PCI DSS compliance.
4. Better Decision Making
- Pain Point: It becomes challenging for organizations to decide which area to invest resources in due to conflicting priorities.
- Solution: The maturity model provides actionable insights stemming from risk assessments and organizational goals.
- Effect: Allocation of resources is optimized to result in a better security posture without overspending.
Example: An e-commerce company chooses to focus on multi-factor authentication over other projects after doing a risk analysis and minimizing account breaches.
Achieving enterprise cyber resilience requires a multi-dimensional approach, combining assessment, strategy, and continuous improvement. This can be attained by leveraging on Fidelis Security’s most advanced solutions and frameworks. Fortify your enterprise’s network in alignment with NIST’s Cyber Resilience Framework and shield it from threats by our next-generation detection, response, and prevention tools.
Get started now towards resilient enterprise cybersecurity by talking to Fidelis Security regarding your custom-designed protection.
Frequently Ask Questions
What is the objective of a cyber resilience strategy?
It provides an organization the ability to operate crucial processes during and even after the execution of a cyberattack through through a process that involves identification of threats, risk mitigation, incident response, and prompt recovery with less disruption.
How can a cyber resilience maturity model benefit an organization?
By helping to identify gaps for prioritized improvement, thus presenting a roadmap on resilience, conformity to regulations, and better choices in resource utilization.
Why is continuous improvement important in cyber resilience?
Continuous Improvement is necessary because threats in the cyber world are evolving. Updating strategies and policies continually keeps organizations ahead of the challenges and strengthens the defenses over time.
