After the disruption to regular business routines spurred by the pandemic, it’s been difficult to plan for what comes next. Enterprises have been so busy reacting to a suddenly distributed workforce and figuring out changes to their business models, that planning how to keep company assets protected – or what to do with compromised ones in the face of a breach – might have become an afterthought. If that balance has become skewed in your enterprise, it’s time to take a fresh look at the importance of cyber resilience.

The term cyber resilience goes beyond the strict definition of cybersecurity. Cybersecurity generally refers to an organization’s ability to protect and avoid threats from cybercrime. According to an IDC Market Spotlight, cyber resilience goes beyond cybersecurity, merging it with “risk management, business continuity, and resilience practices that further the organization’s ability to withstand and recover from any accidental or deliberate attempt to keep the organization from performing its core functions”.

Read that again – “…withstand and recover from any accidental or deliberate attempt to keep the organization from performing its core functions”. Every year, the risk of breach grows as cybercriminals become more sophisticated – some estimate as high as a 30 per cent likelihood. So, while it’s important to plan how to “protect against and avoid” cybercrime, it’s also crucial to have a plan if you do experience a breach.

But being truly resilient is more than a plan for what to do once you’re breached. When an organization is cyber resilient, customers maintain – and even accelerate – their trust in you. You still reliably deliver on your promises, and surviving business volatility isn’t a question that customers even ask. Remarkably, cyber resilient businesses can even grow through these adversities because they have a robust platform that enables them to run their business today while transforming it to take advantage of tomorrow’s opportunities.

So how do organizations become cyber resilient? By shifting to a model that aligns their business outcomes with the level of risk they are willing to bear. This often means a change of culture and mindset for security teams. It requires embedding security across the organization, rather than running a separate security practice. Doing this enables seamless delivery of innovative solutions that are secure – driving competitive differentiation and faster customer adoption.

There are three critical areas to focus on as enterprises assume a more cyber resilient posture:

• Protect: Organizations must protect their most important assets, whether it’s infrastructure, systems, or data. Identity governance, advanced authentication, vulnerability detection and persistent data protection can all help decrease gaps in your security posture. When you are secure in these areas, you also protect things like intellectual property and brand reputation.
• Detect: Let’s lay our cards on the table – threat actors are both smart and determined. The fast-changing pace of cyberthreats and risks mean you have to find a way to anticipate what’s coming. Making smart decisions about cyber resilience means you need intelligent, analytics-driven solutions that help you detect threats before there are consequences.
• Evolve: We need to go beyond a reactionary stance on security posture to using all the tools in our arsenal – including AI and machine learning. That way, we can quickly evolve to easily embrace events such as the ones so prominently featured during the pandemic.

By focusing on these key outcomes, organizations can transform themselves into cyber resilient enterprises, no matter what is going on around them. CyberRes, a Micro Focus line of business, helps enterprises accelerate trust, reliability and survivability through times of adversity, crisis and business volatility. Our portfolios are part of a larger set of digital transformation solutions developed to fight adverse conditions. With them, organizations can continue to run today to meet today’s needs, and transform to take advantage of tomorrow’s opportunities for growth. Contact CyberRes today. Learn more at CyberRes.com