Cyber resilience is the ability to continuously deliver a business outcome despite adverse cyber events. It also encapsulates the ability to restore regular operations after crises or critical security events and the ability to continuously change or adapt in the face of ever-changing risk environments.

Organisations and critical infrastructure are increasingly dependent on cyberspace. Therefore, the ability to establish cyber resilient information and communications systems that survive persistent, stealthy, and sophisticated attacks is an increasingly valuable business strategy.

Consequently, a cyber resilience framework approach is a crucial component of modern-day business. In the face of rising threats from malware, phishing and evolving threat actors, a cyber resilient organisation can position itself as a secure business that its customers can trust.

According to Cisco’s 2020 CISO Benchmark report, 46% of organisations (up from 30% in the previous year’s report) had an incident caused by an unpatched vulnerability, which was a key concern in 2020. In addition, those that had a major breach due to an unpatched vulnerability last year experienced higher levels of data loss.

Despite the growing security risks in a remote working world, many companies still lack cyber resilience. According to CISO Lens – published in November 2020, in partnership with AustCyber – most large, knowledge worker-centric organisations were designed around the assumption that many of their people work in an office most of the time. As knowledge workers transitioned to working consistently from home, numerous technical problems and risks arose on short notice with little warning. In 2019, just 49% of enterprise leaders felt confident about their organisation’s ability to detect a cybersecurity threat, let alone contain it.

We know that cyber resilience is the ability for an organisation to continue normal operations while it attempts to detect, control, and recover from threats against its data and IT infrastructure.  A significant disruption can have a major impact on work and may even result in fines and a damaged reputation. Additionally, developing cyber resilience does not necessarily come down to having the perfect incident response tools; often, the companies that struggle with cybersecurity do not fail because of a technology issue, instead, it is a problem that involves a combination of People, Process and Technology.

 

CT Approach

CT Cyber takes a multi-layered approach when adopting cyber resilience. This ensures a strong integrated alignment between People, Process and Technology, intertwined with Principles, Risk and Controls across the environment. A multi-layered approach also ensures that cyber security does not consider any of these in isolation; if one of these components is unsecured, the entire system is vulnerable. Implementing a good degree of cyber protection requires several elements to allow a holistic approach. At CT Cyber we understand that security must cover the entire system, not just individual devices, and it also must be the responsibility of all stakeholders. 

The framework aligns with four key cyber security principles, whose purpose is to provide strategic guidance on how organisations can protect their systems and information from cyber threats:

  1. Governance: The process of identifying and managing security risks across the organisation
  2. Detect: The process of identifying and detecting cybersecurity events
  3. Protect: The process of implementing adequate security controls to reduce security risks
  4. Respond and Recover: The process of responding to events and incidents to limit damage

Our model further determines the efficacy of these principles by identifying the key controls that align to meet the principal objectives across devices, applications, data, communications, and users. Included is the critical risk matrix, which determines the likelihood and impact of these principles and controls. We further apply a maturity matrix to determine how far along an organisation is and plan its future path based on where it sits in our maturity cycle.

This framework gives organisations a strong foundation that ties cyber resiliency to driving key business outcomes and risks and an opportunity for leaders to have meaningful discussions with executive leadership and boards.

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