Cyber resiliency is the need of the hour because it helps enterprises stay safe from cybersecurity incidents. In case of an adverse situation, resilience is what helps recovery with minimal impact on the system.
There is a surge in cyber-attacks, and only a preventive cyber security strategy will not be sufficient to secure an IT infrastructure from full-blown attacks. Hence enterprises are increasingly investing in cyber resilience to ensure business continuity during adversity. The idea of resilience is an effective way for enterprises to protect, identify, respond, recover, and learn from serious cyber incidents.
To strengthen the security and resiliency of their organization, Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) must implement a comprehensive cyber resilience framework. Here are a few critical components the cyber resilience framework needs to include:
The Prevent/Avoid Process
This first step that will help prevent the execution of a successful attack or identify adverse conditions is to identify and avoid the basic causes of risk. This activity toughens the assets depending on the data collected from the systems that have understood the risk and identified its source. It also reduces the target’s attractiveness and minimizes the attack surface area. Multi-Factor authentication plays a crucial role in this process, particularly in the present perimeter-less ecosystem.
The Action Plan Preparation
Preparing and maintaining realistic action plans to counteract forecasted and anticipated adversity will help the organization be cyber resilient. Utilization of the available resources and deploying them whenever required enhances efficiency. Enterprises can use two well-known active preparation methods- breach and attack simulation or red-blue-purple teaming.
Also Read: A Cyber-Resilience Model for Striking the Right Balance between Business and Security
Ensuring Business Continuity
This next step ensures the continuity of critical missions and business functions at their total capacity, even during adversity, such as preventing single-point failures. This will also guard and secure the fragility of the design, whether in business, workflow, or system design. This process component will also help get valuable insights into the need for a more robust solution design framework and how to achieve it.
Containing the Attack Surface
A smaller attack surface area will help enterprises minimize the consequential costs. It allows them a lot more time to concentrate on defense and tracking strategy. Vendors or third-party supply chains are a high risk to organizations of all sizes. The IT infrastructure might have an internal attack surface area that exposes any unknown access to the sensitive assets. The CISO should focus on factors beyond external threats. Instead, a good way is to initiate with a threat model that spots the most common attack vectors in every system against anticipated actors.
Reconstitution Post Recovery
Identification of the ‘good state’ and deploying it after suffering from an attack will enrich cyber resiliency. A certain level of flexibility in the design will ensure resources can be re-deployed quickly, maintaining minimum disruption.
Maintain a Strong Intelligence Flow
Threat intelligence is an efficient way to keep an eye on the adversaries in the threat environment. For instance, it tracks the past, present, and future incidents with their agenda and capabilities and other incidents that indicate a cybersecurity threat. Business Intelligence (BI) spots the common critical resources across various functions and systems wherein the IOCs can be identified and evaluated for damage and reliability. It is impossible to protect every asset against all the possible risks; hence, cybersecurity resources need to be concentrated on the aspects that have the greatest impact on business.
Transform and Re-architect
For any process, the objective and scope need to be evaluated thoroughly. The CISO needs to make necessary changes in the business functions or supporting workflow to manage adversity more efficiently. The first step would be to eliminate legacy components or even a whole system, and implement the latest ones in their infrastructure. Thereafter, the CISO needs to redefine the system to accomplish cyber resilience goals.
Cybercriminals also evolve their strategies to tackle all the cybersecurity measures that CISOs have implemented. Hence, it is crucial that the CISO of any enterprise create a cyber-resilient system to protect their IT infrastructure.
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