16 Nov 6 Steps To Help You Plan A Cyber Resilience Roadmap

How to start the conversation

Potential starter. How many staff members in your company are solely responsible for cybersecurity?
Experience has shown that many, if not most organizations regardless of size, don’t apply resources towards cybersecurity until they have an incident. Cybersecurity job positions are up 74% over the past five years.

You need to ask yourself and the team members the following questions:

Are you sure that your most important systems are safe?

A scary reality is that many businesses leaders aren’t focused on what is keeping them in business and how much protected the data is. They most likely don’t know where it is located. (AWS/Azure/Google One Premium) and some may not even know what this data is. Of all files, 21% remain completely unprotected.

When was the last security assessment performed?

In depth, security assessment should be performed at least 2 times a year, or anytime a material change takes place in the infrastructure.

Are you following a framework?

A framework is a guide to building cyber resilience. Without a framework, you will likely miss key elements in your architecture. Think of it as trying to build a structure without a blueprint.

If you want to establish Cyber Resilience Plan follow these 6 steps:

1) Focus on resilience:

Cyber resilience focuses on ensuring that business operations do not entirely break down during and despite an attack.

Today’s businesses face greater cyber risks and threats than ever before. One in six firms attacked in the past year have had their survival threatened as the spate of cyberattacks continues to increase, unabated. That justifies how essential cyber resilience is for business continuity. And amid all these trends, we must ensure that our organizations remain designed for the future — i.e. flexible, efficient and resilient against attacks to preserve business operations.

Business continuity is a major driver of the future of business operations. According to SHRM COVID-19 research, 83% of employers have made business adjustments due to COVID-19. The problem, however, is that many companies still don’t know what they should be prioritizing. Should we be focused on preventing cyberattacks or protecting our assets during a crisis? The stakes are high.

2) Build a risk strategy:

When it comes to building and optimizing your cyber risk strategy, there’s one ultimate pattern you should keep in mind: discover, assess, remediate, repeat. Once you gain visibility into the unknown risks lurking across your growing attack surface, you need to ensure you have a streamlined and effective process for evaluating and mitigating those threats. And as new cyber risks are constantly entering the scene, it’s critical that your assessments go beyond periodic, compliance-based cyber reviews that only provide a point-in-time snapshot of your security performance.

In today’s “new normal” operating environment, it’s critical that you take a step back and reassess your traditional methods for tracking and evaluating your security performance over time. By leveraging a standardized, easily understandable cyber security KPI like security ratings at every stage of the process, you can optimize your cyber risk strategy and find new operational efficiencies — ultimately enabling you to do more with less.

3) Understand critical assets:

You need to identify and prioritize your assets. Assets include things like clients’ data, servers, and sensitive partner documents, among other critical assets your organization may identify. It’s important to work with the management and business users to create a list of all the valuable assets. Also, it’s important to define a standard for determining the importance of specific assets.

The common criteria for defining the importance of each asset include monetary value, legal standing, and the importance of each asset to the organization. Once the standard is approved by the management and formally incorporated into your organization’s risk assessment security policy, use it to classify the identified assets as critical, major, or minor.

4) Define a budget:

Budgeting for cybersecurity is a challenging process, in part because implementing security measures is not a finite task: it’s a series of interrelated, ongoing processes. Providing adequate cybersecurity resources should not be an afterthought; rather, it must inform every step of the process.

5) Create a Framework (Strategy) For doing so, you need to follow these steps:

1) Choose a Framework: Choosing the appropriate framework for your business is a strategic decision and is one of the early steps in building a complete cybersecurity program for your organization. Security frameworks vary in terms of industry focus, type and number of security requirements, and other layers of complexity.
2) Common language and controls: The Framework provides a common language for understanding, managing, and expressing cybersecurity risk to internal and external stakeholders. It can be used to help identify and prioritize actions for reducing cybersecurity risk, and it is a tool for aligning policy, business, and technological approaches to managing that risk.
3) Limit focus on point solutions: Cybersecurity has its own world of point solutions – often referred to by acronym and built to stave off specific types of threats. While the method of going best of breed might seem like an obvious path, it carries with it hidden overhead costs. It takes time to train staff on specific features, it takes resources to keep solutions maintained and upgraded, issues arise with data consistency, costs are exacerbated for IT/cybersecurity training, and so on.

6) Practice (Tactics)

Put strategies into practice, through Tactical daily operations that can let you Constantly improve and refine