Cyber Resilience: The Key to Ensuring Business Continuity

We live in an era where attacks have become routine. They are increasingly frequent and sophisticated, leading us to accept that our organization will likely face an attack at some point. Therefore, organizations must not only continue their preventive measures but also prepare to respond effectively during and after an incident to minimize its impact on operations and maintain a positive customer experience.

The core principle of cyber resilience is ensuring that the business continues to operate during and after a cyberattack. This involves implementing processes, procedures, and technologies that enable critical functions to persist through an attack (which can last for weeks) and to quickly restore operations, minimizing disruption to the business and its customers.

While organizations often confuse cyber resilience with cybersecurity, they are distinct yet complementary approaches. Cybersecurity focuses on protection and detection, while cyber resilience emphasizes preparing the organization for an attack, including developing action plans for both the immediate response and recovery phases.

An effective cyber resilience plan should address cybersecurity aspects while also integrating with the company’s strategy, employee culture, management of critical assets, workplace configuration, and even specific strategies such as fraud prevention methods.

Central to this plan is the preparation of people. In cybersecurity, training helps employees detect potential threats and adopt specific behaviors, such as reporting suspicious emails, avoiding unknown attachments, or disconnecting from the network when anomalies are detected. In cyber resilience, training should focus on how to respond during an incident, particularly on how to perform essential tasks without relying on potentially compromised systems. A recent example illustrates this: employees at some airlines, faced with system outages, manually created boarding passes. This simple and effective approach allowed the business to keep operating despite the technological challenges.

Can an organization’s cyber resilience be measured? Yes, it can be assessed to identify areas for improvement. Guides and controls are available to help with this measurement. However, the true level of resilience can only be gauged after an incident occurs. The stress of the situation and unexpected variables will test all pre-established strategies, making continuous learning during incident management crucial for enhancing cyber resilience.

Cyberattacks are becoming more sophisticated, frequent, and difficult to detect. No organization is immune. The key difference is knowing how to respond when an attack occurs. A cyber-resilient company can manage incidents while minimizing financial losses, recovery costs, and expenses related to fines and claims. Additionally, it reduces the impact on third parties, protects its reputation, and, most importantly, remains competitive to continue leading in the future.