5 Ways To Foster Cyber Resilience In Your Company

In this modern age, cybercrimes only continue to grow both in frequency and complexity. For businesses to stay competitive in such an unpredictable environment, your organisation's security should be your top priority. Hence, traditional cybersecurity solutions and strategies may no longer be enough to combat increasingly sophisticated cybercrimes. You need to implement a robust cybersecurity resilience strategy that allows you to ensure business continuity when a cybersecurity incident occurs.

Read on to know the tips on building and fostering cyber resilience in your business.

What Exactly Is Cyber Resilience?

Cyber resilience is the capacity to be prepared, respond to, and recover from cyber threats. It's the 'how' a business reacts to cyber-attacks and security breaches and successfully overcomes the issues to continue its daily operations.

This practice has emerged since traditional cybersecurity strategies are no longer enough to protect a business from increasing cyber-attacks. Thus, companies must shift their focus to a more proactive approach, resorting to cyber resilience strategies to ensure survival.

How To Build And Promote Cyber Resilience In Your Business?

Cyber resilience is an increasingly recognised aspect of overall business incident management today. If you don't know where to start, here are some tips on building and fostering cyber resiliency in your company.

1. Partner With An IT Company

Hiring a dedicated IT company can help you plan and implement your cyber resilience strategy. Even if you already have an in-house IT team, outsourcing companies like Nens, one of the best IT services in Boston, can provide the necessary support.

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With experience working with several businesses, IT companies can give your team a fresh perspective on cyber threat issues. They also have the necessary technology, diverse skills, and talents to implement an effective cyber resilience strategy. With a reliable IT company supporting your business, you can reduce the workload of your in-house team so that they can focus more on other important tasks.

2. Use The Zero Trust Approach

Today's modern business environment is quite complex. This is particularly true as more of the workforce are implementing remote or mobile work, allowing employees to work from anywhere and use applications outside corporate network protections.

With the increasing number of remotely connected devices and endpoints, the potential attack surfaces that cybercriminals can exploit also increases. Thus, you must adopt an assume breach mindset and use a 'zero trust' approach.

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Zero trust requires all users—whether outside or inside the business's network—to be consistently authenticated, validated, and authorised for security configuration before being granted access to data and applications. It should extend throughout the entire digital estate of your business, providing users only the access they need to do their work while still explicitly verifying and monitoring every access request.

3. Establish A Penetration Testing Program

A penetration testing program means using penetration testing tools and ethical hacking. Moreover, penetration testing tools can help automate specific tasks, discover issues that might be difficult to find using manual analysis strategies, and improve testing efficiency.

The more important part is hiring ethical hackers. Ethical hacking refers to the authorised attempt to breach and gain unauthorised access to a business's network and computer system. An ethical hack involves duplicating actions and strategies of cybercriminals and malicious attackers to gain access.

Hiring ethical hackers can help you discover any weaknesses and security vulnerabilities in your IT infrastructure and resolve them before a malicious attacker can exploit them.

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Establishing a penetration testing program can consistently update your network's security, minimising risk and enhancing resiliency.

4. Train Your People

It's a common fact that your employees are one of your business's most significant cybersecurity risks. Your employees are often targeted by cybercriminals and may cause cybersecurity breaches unintentionally. As cyber criminals find more ways to deceive their employees into causing cyber security damage, not enough companies are countering by educating their employees about identifying and resolving suspicious activities.

As the weakest link in the security chain, investing in cybersecurity awareness training is the only solution. Note that cybersecurity seminars and training are not only for your IT teams. Cybersecurity best practices must be facilitated across all aspects of a business in a cyber-resilient business. All employees—from executives to managers to each team member—should be properly trained and aware of cyber threats.

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That said, ongoing cyber security education is critical. After all, the cyber world only continues to evolve, so regular training ensures that your employees stay updated on the latest cybersecurity trends. Remember, an untrained employee can be your greatest threat. Meanwhile, well-trained staff can become your best defense against intruders. So, make sure to foster a positive cyber security culture where everyone is supported and encouraged to learn and report suspicious activities.

5. Create A Backup And Recovery Plan

Backups are a critical aspect of cyber resiliency. You need to consider situations where cyber threats bypass your defenses. Since detecting and resolving cyber threats can be time-consuming, it's vital always to have copies of data and files for business continuity.

So, make sure to have scheduled backup and file versioning to mitigate the impact of cyber threats and data loss. Conduct an inventory of all assets that need to be backed up in a cyber emergency and determine how often you should do backup.

That said, backup and recovery should go together. A backup is only effective if it allows for the rapid recovery of data and systems with minimal disruption. Thus, you must always test your disaster recovery strategies and practices before experiencing an actual disaster. Take note that disasters can come in different sizes and types, so you must test from small, simple file recovery to wide-scale system restoration.

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In general, businesses should test once a quarter or a year, ensuring that their systems are cyber-resilient and can be recovered efficiently.

Takeaway

With modern businesses depending more on technology, cyber resilience has become a top priority for businesses. By following the above tips, you can ensure that your business can prevent, respond to and quickly recover from potential cyber risks and attacks. With a strong cyber resilience plan in place, you can ensure that your business continues to thrive.