Being Cyber Resilient Means Being Able to Recover Quickly after the Inevitable Hack. Do You Know How to Achieve Cyber Resilience in Your Organization?
In an era when cyber attacks are escalating in size, frequency and cost, much has been said about cybersecurity. But has your organization considered how to achieve cyber resilience in your organization?
“What is cyber resilience?” is a question more companies need to be asking. Why? Because cyber resilience is a more modern way of looking at your cyber security program—one that acknowledges that hacks are inevitable, and steps must be taken so an organization can both repel and recover from attacks. To survive in a world where hacks occur every few seconds, companies must prepare for what happens in the wake of a cyber attack. That’s where cyber resilience comes in. It’s a major area where Integris is working with customers to up their security game through cloud computing.
What is Cyber Resilience? What Does It Looks Like in Most Companies?
Companies considering how to achieve cyber resilience in their networks can often get overwhelmed by the idea, believing that it’s costly or impossible to execute. It’s not. In fact, cyber resilience programs are really just the next step in cybersecurity—one that allows companies working fully or partially in the cloud to maximize the security benefits this platform can bring them.
Put simply, a cyber resilience program is comprised of three pillars: protecting your data, detecting incoming threats quickly, and adapting fast to threats. That effort can have a lot of applications, from high-end email incursion and anti-spoofing systems to round-the-clock security monitoring, to advanced backup systems that allow you to have a system disabled by hacks back up in minutes. And, when a company is cyber resilient, they have the endpoint and user data that can help them detect hacks as they are happening—not days or months later.
That’s what scalable, affordable cyber resilience looks like. If you’re asking yourself how to achieve cyber resilience in your company, here’s what you’d need to have in place.
Enhanced Network Data Visibility
It’s not enough to be able to access all your files, software, or user data. You need to see trends in usage, and understand how those patterns play out in your systems. It might seem like inside baseball, a little bit of excess data gathering at first. But it’s most definitely not. As companies move to the cloud, Microsoft Windows 365 Cloud PC can give them dashboard-level analysis of system health and usage. And when you have that kind of access to information, you can notice when there are spikes of emails pouring in to the company from foreign actors, when spam spikes, and when failed login attempts are battering your systems, as a start. Alerts can be set that can help you catch problems, before they get started. It’s a level of intelligence you need to have around your network, if you want to keep it safe.
Doubled Cloud-Based Backups
The beauty of working in the cloud is the backups that Microsoft can give you. After all, when you work in the cloud, you no longer have to worry about what happens if there’s a fire in your server room, or a physical rack malfunctions. Your cloud provider provides that backup for you. But what happens if your backup fails to backup? This is why here at Integris we recommend our clients use an additional cloud-based backup company. This allows your files and data to be backed up in two places. If something goes wrong, you have everything you need to reboot, and just keep going.
Zero Trust Authentications
Zero Trust is the big buzzword in security circles these days, and for good reason. Zero Trust networks increase your security exponentially. Instead of asking a user to authenticate via a password when they log in, zero trust environments ask users to have multi-factor logins. This usually means users will type in a password, then cross verify their identity through an app, usually on their personal phone. Then, when while they work, their identity and password credentials are continuously checked and matched up to their system activity. Not only does this vastly cut down on the number of hackers spoofing your employees, it also gives you that data visibility mentioned earlier. And that can help you smoke out hackers hijacking employee permissions.
Enhanced Security Awareness Training
When companies ask us how to achieve cyber resilience, enhanced security training is something we always recommend. Why? Because your employees are your most important foot soldiers in the war to keep your data safe. They need to understand how threats are evolving from month to month, and understand the seriousness of your security procedures. We regularly work with clients to do cybersecurity drills and simulations with employees, and help them administrate regular online security training courses for their employees. Getting passing grades on those trainings should be mandatory for every person you employ, and anyone with access to your network.
How to Achieve Cyber Resilience: Are You Ready to Take the Next Step?
If you’d like to do a little reading up on cyber resilience and the managed cloud services Integris offers, we have a great number of resources available to you in our Modern Workplace Journey Essentials Kit, including assessments, special reports, and more. Running a nonprofit? We’ve got you covered there too, with our recent live event replay on Risks to Nonprofits in 2021 and How to Mitigate. We’ll show you how moving to the cloud can improve both your security and your productivity!
