Traditional cybersecurity tools don’t provide sufficient protection against today’s new and evolving threats. It is no longer enough to focus only on preventing cyberattacks; IT teams must be prepared to respond to and recover from any type of security event, unplanned outage, or service disruption.
Although ransomware attacks frequently end up in the news there are multiple ways for businesses to be disrupted—some malicious and others circumstantial.
A few of the most common sources of unplanned outages other than cyberattacks include natural disasters, technology failures, and good old-fashioned human error.
On the surface, these threats don’t have much in common, but they all have the potential to negatively impact business continuity and data security significantly.
Cyber Resilience Is Now a Business Imperative
The recent Kaseya ransomware attack, which to date has affected at least 1,000 businesses, perfectly underscores the need for IT teams to prioritize cyber resilience.
Cyber resilience is an organization’s ability to prepare for, respond to, and recover from cyberattacks and data breaches while maintaining near-normal business operations.
Effective cyber resilience depends on the three Ps: predicting, prioritizing, and practicing. In other words, the business must be able to anticipate, or predict, a breach and proactively prepare for it rather than taking a reactionary approach. Not all vulnerabilities are emergencies, so prioritizing what to protect and when saves wasted time and effort.
And, finally, every organization needs enforceable policies, procedures, and accountability built into their business strategy. These safeguards should be revisited, revised, and tested (i.e., practiced) regularly to ensure they consider emerging threats, major staffing, and technology changes within the organization.
How to Implement the Cyber Resilience Trifecta
To be maximally effective against breaches and data loss in today’s unpredictable cybersecurity environment, businesses must move beyond their usual defense strategies and implement the cyber resilience trifecta that integrates cybersecurity, data protection, and immutable backups.
The cyber resilience trifecta has three core objectives: identify and detect, manage and protect, and respond and recover.
Identify and Detect: Integrated Cybersecurity
Hackers change tactics like most people change socks, which makes a set-it-and-forget-it defense impossible.
The best defense against today’s threats involves a mix of technologies, including deep learning neural networks, signature-based and signatureless malware detection, anti-exploit technology, and behavioral analysis.
Manage and Protect: Seamless Data Protection
Today’s users are rabidly protective of their data privacy. Even the hint of a breach is often enough to send you customers running to your competitor.
Ensure your sensitive company, employee, and customer data is out of harm’s way by utilizing a combination of the latest solutions. These solutions include scalable, secure backups; automated failover and redundancy; data encryption at rest and in motion; and cloud-based services such as data protection as a service.
Respond and Recover: Immutable Storage
Whether on-premises or in the cloud, immutable storage protects data from being overwritten, changed, tampered with, or deleted—even by someone (or something) with admin rights.
Immutable storage ensures there will almost always be a clean, current copy of the data available for restoration after a disaster. However, even immutable storage is not 100 percent bulletproof, so it should be used as one part of a comprehensive data protection strategy, not as the sole backup source.
Benefits of a Well-Crafted Cyber Resilience Strategy
Done well, the cyber resilience trifecta can prevent successful security breaches, minimize data loss, and expedite recovery—which is more important now than it has ever been, if recent history and the current cyber threat climate are any indications.
Security experts predict ransomware attacks will become even more frequent, more damaging, and more difficult to detect over the next few years. With that in mind, IT teams must proactively create defense and recovery plans that incorporate cybersecurity technology, data protection solutions, and immutable backups.
Download What's Next? Data Protection in a Post-2020 World to learn how to create a future-proof cyber resilience strategy based on the valuable lessons IT teams learned from the events of 2020.
