The increasing number of cyber-attacks on enterprises across industries provide an insight that the digital landscape, driven by data, is becoming increasingly vulnerable. Hence, they must take initiatives to become more cyber resilient.
According to the 2020 Cyber resilient report published by IBM Security and Ponemon Institute, 67% of organizations have reported a surge in cyber-attacks over the past 12 months. The same organizations also stated that the severity of these cyber-attacks has significantly increased.
This rise in cyber-attacks is worrying enterprises and making them desperate to seek out ways to keep their infrastructure intact. However, more investment in better infrastructure, tools, and security is not an option anymore.
The pandemic has crippled organizations’ economic ability and resources, forcing them to sustain their businesses within a strict budget. Hence, it is imperative that organizations strategize and adopt practices that secure their IT infrastructure and enable them to become cyber resilient.
By implementing a strategic approach, enterprises can prevent, detect, contain, and recover from various threats to data, application, and IT infrastructure security. However, to achieve cyber resiliency, enterprises must let go of their preconceived notions and practices.
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Integrating cloud services and leveraging automation and interoperable solutions, are key factors that set high-performing enterprises, setting them apart from their peers. In addition, these organizations also develop attack-specific and enterprise-wide incident response plans, which strengthen consistency and collaboration when faced with enterprise-wide cyber threats.
Below are a few factors that enterprises should focus on, in order to mitigate cyber-attacks and attain cyber resilience:
Reducing architectural complexity
It is appealing to have a complex environment setup in place to tackle cyber-attacks. However, having more complex security tools in place can often make the infrastructure vulnerable to cyber-attacks due to a lack of interoperability and efficiency. Agility Suffers as well, since having a complex environment slows down the attack detection and response time.
Therefore, integrating automated solutions can minimize the complexity and dramatically increase the time-of-detection of attacks, resolving incidents before they escalating into full-blown breaches.
Taking Appropriate Preventive measures
Most organizations consider the prevention of cyber-attacks as the top-most priority metric while evaluating their cyber resilience. It is also the area that most successful enterprises have invested heavily in, and have made the most improvements.
Leaders of successful enterprises use automation, artificial intelligence, and machine learning more than their counterparts. This integration of innovative technologies automates solutions in risk and vulnerability assessment as well as improves visibility by liberating higher-value tasks.
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Having a foolproof plan
Responding to cyber-attacks and containing them in a timely manner is a crucial ingredient of cyber resiliency. To contain cyber-attacks, high performing enterprises prepare themselves and have an incident response plan in place. They continuously review their plans and are more likely to develop attack-specific response plans for the notable cyber-attacks.
Thus having a foolproof plan for incident containment and response procedures can significantly reduce the frequency, as well as their chances of occurrence.
Cyber resilient enterprises far exceed their peers when it comes to their IT security operations. The enterprise culture is driven by collaboration where data privacy and security are valued.
They continuously evaluate their infrastructure and come up with solutions that help them to contain cybersecurity attacks. High performing enterprises are wise about making their investments.
They understand that adding new security tools to the pool is not the answer, but integrating those which support automation, supports the security analysts and makes their jobs easier.
