What is Cyber Resilience?

As cyber threats continue to rise in number and complexity, organizations must protect their businesses and critical processes through building cyber resilience. This is especially the case for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) who are increasingly being targeted by cybercriminals, but often have fewer resources and smaller security teams.  To manage these threats effectively, companies must look beyond traditional cybersecurity defenses and build cyber resilience. 

Cyber resilience refers to an organization's ability to prepare for, respond to, and recover from cyber threats. While traditional cybersecurity strategies may focus on preventing data breaches, cyber resilience ensures that your business can maintain its core operations and protect critical data, even when prevention fails.  

Therefore, by adopting a cyber resilient strategy, your organization can not only detect threats earlier, but continue to function, limit damage to internal systems, and quickly return to normal after an attack.  This is key to maintaining customer loyalty, complying with industry regulations, and being more proactive in your cyber risk management strategy as a whole.  

How Do Cybersecurity and Cyber Resilience Work Together?

While traditional cybersecurity measures and cyber resilience are closely related, they play distinct yet complementary roles in protecting your organization.  

Traditional cybersecurity is the practice of defending computer systems, networks, and sensitive information from unauthorized access, disruption, modification, or destruction. This involves implementing the first line of defense designed to prevent intrusions, detect threats, and maintain the integrity of your digital environment such as firewalls, antivirus software, encryption, and access controls.  

For instance, your cybersecurity practices might include: 

• Network Security: Implementing firewalls and intrusion detection systems. 
• Endpoint Protection: Safeguarding devices like laptops and smartphones with antivirus software. 
• Access Management: Ensuring only authorized users can access sensitive data. 

However, even the most secure defenses can be breached. Cyber resilience is the ability for an organization to plan, defend, adapt, and recover from cyberattacks. In doing so, the practice of building resilience acknowledges that no defense is foolproof and that it's not just a matter of "if" but "when" an attack will occur. 

When your organization is resilient, it’s not just equipped to block and detect threats; it’s ready to adapt to attacks, contain breaches, and maintain core business operations even as an incident is unfolding. A strong cyber resilience strategy allows your business to: 

• Detect and Isolate: Identify a breach quickly, isolate affected systems, and prevent the spread. 
• Limit Damage: Contain the attack’s impact to avoid a full-scale operational disruption. 
• Recover Efficiently: Retrieve lost or stolen data and restore normal operations with minimal downtime. 

Why is Cyber Resilience Important?

With sophisticated cyberattacks on the rise, it’s no longer enough to simply try to prevent an attack. The benefits of cyber resilience extend beyond just security; it helps businesses reduce downtime, maintain customer trust, and safeguard their brand reputation.  

A resilient organization can quickly adapt to cyber disruptions and continue core operations, minimizing both the financial and reputational damage that downtime can cause. For instance, if a ransomware attack were to occur, having a cyber resilience strategy in place means your team could detect the breach, contain its spread, and restore critical systems quickly, all while keeping clients and stakeholders informed and reassured. 

In addition, many industries face increasing regulatory requirements that include cyber resilience measures (e.g., NIS2 Directive). Failure to meet these requirements can result in significant fines and penalties, making resilience not just a good practice, but a legal necessity. For SMBs, staying compliant is key to protecting not only sensitive data but also avoiding costly regulatory actions that can impact long-term sustainability. 

Beyond compliance and protection, cyber resilience can also be a competitive advantage for businesses that want to demonstrate a strong commitment to protecting sensitive information and ensuring service continuity. It gives potential customers, partners, and stakeholders confidence that your business is well-prepared for any cyber disruption. Moreover, by embracing cyber resilience, you can pursue digital transformation initiatives with greater confidence, without the fear of catastrophic losses that could derail growth and innovation. 

The Four Critical Pillars of Cyber Resilience: Anticipate, Withstand, Recover, and Adapt  

To build cyber resilience your organization needs to be able to address the four critical pillars: 

Anticipating Cyber Threats

As your company grows, so does its attack surface. To build a cybersecurity program that anticipates threats, your business needs to proactively identify security gaps in your environment. This can involve regularly performing risk assessments, vulnerability scans, and maintaining a comprehensive security program that evolves as your business and technology change. 

Withstanding Cyberattacks 

Withstanding cyberattacks means stopping or containing the spread quickly, with minimal impact on your business operations. In other words, you’re prepared to hold your ground against malicious activity. To withstand cyberattacks, your business needs advanced detection, 24/7 threat hunting, end-to-end coverage, and complete response so you can address potential cyber threats before they escalate into serious breaches.  

Recovering from Cyberattacks

Recovery is about ensuring that when disaster strikes, your business can contain the incident quickly, restore operations, and minimize downtime. The speed and efficiency with which your organization can recover from an attack are crucial to reducing costs, preserving brand reputation, and restoring customer trust. This means having an incident response program that can react with speed and efficacy, effective backup systems, and disaster recovery plans to mitigate business disruption. 

Adapting to the Threat Landscape

Adapting is about evolution and resilience over time. Cyber threats are constantly changing, and so should your defense strategies. You should regularly review your organization’s security policies, update your cyber defense measures, and learn from past incidents to improve your security posture continuously. This ensures that your business stays prepared for new and unforeseen types of attacks, and it also helps you remain compliant with the latest regulations and industry best practices. 

Which Strategies Can Help with Becoming Cyber Resilient? 

There are four key strategies that can help your business anticipate, withstand, and recover from cyber threats to build cyber resilience, including: 

Risk Management: Involves identifying, assessing, and mitigating potential risks and threats to protect your business. A successful risk management strategy allows you to prioritize resources effectively, ensuring that your business focuses on protecting its most critical assets while balancing security investments with operational needs. 

Continuous Threat Detection and Response: 24/7 monitoring of network, endpoint, cloud, log, identity and vulnerability data to detect potential cyber threats in real-time and take action before they escalate into larger issues and safeguard your organization against breaches and attacks.  

Vulnerability Management: Involves identifying, prioritizing, and remediating critical vulnerabilities in your systems and applications. This strategy involves both regular scanning and systematic patching to mitigate potential points of exploitation. 

Incident Response: Developing a comprehensive IR plan to contain incidents, and outline the steps your team should take to recover systems and restore normal business operations efficiently. 

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How to Measure Cyber Resilience?

Your business can measure your cyber resilience using key cyber resilience KPIs and metrics. This can help you understand your current cyber resilience, readiness and measure your progress.   

The most critical metrics for measuring cyber resilience include Mean Time to Detect (MTTD), Mean Time to Respond (MTTR), Recovery Time Objective (RTO), and Downtime Cost. Each of these metrics provides insight into your organization’s ability to anticipate, withstand, recover from, and adapt to cyber threats. 

Mean Time to Detect (MTTD): The average time it takes to detect a cyber incident.  

• A shorter MTTD means your security team can quickly spot potential threats before they can cause significant damage.  
• A longer MTTD indicates that an incident may go unnoticed for an extended period, potentially causing a more severe breach or business disruption. 

Mean Time to Respond (MTTR): How quickly your team can neutralize a threat after detection. MTTR often includes steps like containing the threat, eradicating malicious activity, and restoring affected systems. 

• A strong response time minimizes the impact of an incident and prevents it from escalating into a larger breach or prolonged downtime.  

Recovery Time Objective (RTO): The maximum tolerable amount of time in which a business process must be restored after a disruption. This metric reflects how quickly your business needs to recover to maintain essential operations and avoid significant financial or reputational damage. 

Downtime Cost: The financial impact of downtime on your business and how resilience can reduce these losses. This includes the direct costs (e.g., lost revenue, emergency IT support) and indirect costs (e.g., reputational damage, customer churn). By understanding the potential cost of downtime, your business can make informed decisions about investing in cyber resilience measures.  

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Outsourcing the Right Security Capabilities to Build Cyber Resilience 

Cybercriminals are continually using more complex tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) to launch cyberattacks and deploy ransomware as well as other malware. Unfortunately, many organizations are also challenged with the cost of hiring, training, and retaining the highly skilled cybersecurity talent required to stop and eliminate critical cyber threats. 

The reality is that no organization today can afford to be impacted by a cyberattack. As a result, investing in cost-effective cybersecurity services from a provider with the right capabilities can help your business anticipate, withstand and recover from cyber threats faster and more effectively.   

We recommend a partner that provides all spectrums of building cyber resilience and offers end-to-end risk management with strategic services, threat disruption and incident response offerings to ensure your business is protected. 

A Cyber Resilient Future with eSentire

 eSentire’s portfolio of services can help you build a cyber resilient security operation:  

Continuous Threat Exposure Management Services: These strategic services including Managed Vulnerability Assessments, vCISO services, and Managed Phishing & Security Awareness Training to identify gaps, build defensive strategies, operationalize risk mitigation and continuously advance your cybersecurity program. 

Managed Detection and Response (MDR) Services: By combining our cutting-edge XDR platform, 24/7 SOC support, around-the-clock threat hunting and security operations leadership, we hunt and stop known & unknown threats before they disrupt your business. 

Digital Forensics and Incident Response (DFIR) Services: Battle-tested Incident Commander level expertise, crime scene reconstruction and digital forensics investigations that can bear scrutiny in a court of law. The world’s fastest threat suppression guarantee with a 4-hour SLA available with our IR Retainer.  

Contact us to learn how we can help you stay ahead of cyberattacks and build a more cyber resilient security operation today.