With new cyber threats surfacing almost daily, the barometer for adequate cyber resiliency seems to be moving constantly. What kept your environment safe yesterday, may not be enough today. Are you truly taking the concept of cyber resiliency to heart, or just crossing your fingers with every hack tactic debut?
The goal of this blog is to underline the importance of vigilance, especially in the face of the latest cyber threats we’ve been seeing.
Here are 8 reasons why you need to evaluate your cyber resiliency.
Reason #1: Identify Vulnerabilities
Regular assessments of cyber resiliency help organizations before they can be exploited by cybercriminals. If there’s a hole in your canoe, can it float in water? Consider there are threat actors whose entire livelihood consists of them identifying vulnerabilities to exploit. All it takes is one hole in your coverage for an ambitious cybercriminal to ransom your data or corrupt your backups.
Make sure you’re regularly performing vulnerability management and applying patch updates. There are many tools that can automate this process to a degree, like Cisco Intersight among others.
Reason #2: Meet Your Compliance Requirements
Regular evaluations ensure that your organization remains compliant with relevant cybersecurity regulations and standards. As new compliance regulations emerge, like The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), it helps to find an IT Consultant that regularly scans and builds policies around the latest compliance demands for you, so you can take that weight off your shoulders.
Reason #3: Prioritize Proactive Risk Mitigation
Cyber resiliency evaluations can help you understand the potential risks and consequences of cyberattacks. This information is invaluable for making informed decisions about investing in additional cybersecurity measures and risk mitigation strategies.
If you’re like most organizations and are restricted by a budget, why invest in technology that offers more features than you’ll need or use to mitigate risks? An experienced IT consultant can evaluate your environment and use their knowledge of existing technology to help you trim the proverbial fat and invest in only what you need to mitigate relevant risks.
Reason #4: Establish an Effective Business Continuity Plan
Cyberattacks can disrupt operations, and organizations need to ensure business continuity. Assessing cyber resiliency helps you identify and address weaknesses in your recovery and continuity plans, ensuring minimal disruption to business operations in the event of a cyber incident.
A successful business continuity plan accounts for supply chain disruption, efficient incident response, disaster recovery to reduce downtime, as well as regular employee education for basic threat mitigation. This plan should evolve with the emergence of new cyber threats as well.
Reason #5: Build a Good Reputation & Retain Customer Trust
Your company's reputation is critical when potential customers are searching for a solution or service to invest in. Organizations with strong cyber resiliency are more attractive to clients and partners. It can be a competitive advantage in industries where cybersecurity is a top concern.
Think of some of the biggest recent breaches like Target or Equifax. Even the average person has heard of these breaches and may have even fallen victim to them. The ensuing lawsuits from exploited customers could bankrupt smaller organizations. Once damaged, reputations take years to recover if at all.
Demonstrating a commitment to cyber resiliency can enhance trust with customers, partners, and stakeholders. Customers are more likely to do business with organizations that take their data security seriously. This is especially true when they themselves have compliance hoops to jump through like HIPAA, PCI, or CJIS.
Reason #6: Protect Your Finances
Cyberattacks can result in significant financial losses due to data theft, ransom payments, legal liabilities, and more. A robust cyber resiliency program can help minimize financial impacts by reducing the likelihood and severity of such incidents.
We often see organizations cutting corners, or simply checking a box when it comes to their cyber resiliency. However, the cost of that resiliency failing far outweighs the price of investing in the right support up front. A lesson that many unfortunately learn too late.
Reason #7: Establish an Environment of Continuous Improvement
Cyber threats evolve rapidly. Regularly evaluating cyber resiliency allows you to adapt and improve your cybersecurity measures in response to changing threat landscapes, emerging attack vectors, and new technologies.
If you don’t have the manpower to take control of your resiliency or move from a reactive approach to a proactive one, then it may be time to consider outsourcing your cybersecurity efforts.
Reason #8: Prevent Data Loss
Cyber resiliency helps protect sensitive data and intellectual property from theft or destruction, reducing the risk of data loss and the associated costs and consequences. As mentioned above, data protection is the focus of cyber resiliency, and there are various well-reputed options for protecting, backing up, and even isolating that data.
Have IE Evaluate Your Cyber Resiliency
To safeguard your capacity to withstand and bounce back from cyber threats, it is crucial to assess the resilience of your cybersecurity. Conducting regular evaluations of cyber resilience not only helps you uncover vulnerabilities but also enhances your preparedness. They also ensure compliance with regulations and protect an organization's reputation, finances, and operations in an increasingly digital and interconnected world.
Perhaps the hardest part to stay ahead of is that the requirements to maintain resiliency change as new threat actor methods emerge. Consider talking to an IT Consultant that can eliminate guesswork and give a knowledgeable cyber resiliency score for your organization. IE specializes in building and maintaining cyber resiliency best practices for organizations. We’ve created a cyber resilience self-assessment that you can take as a preliminary step to a more in-depth consultation with our security experts. Follow the link below to get started.
