We hear so much about resiliency these days because of the cyber threat. According to Accenture, 68 percent of business leaders feel their cybersecurity risks are increasing. But 54 percent of companies say IT isn’t sophisticated enough to handle advanced cyberattacks (Sophos). To properly address the risk, teams will need to get serious about cyber resilience. So, what is cyber resilience, and why’s it so important?
Well, according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, cyber resilience is the ability to anticipate, withstand, recover from, and adapt to adverse conditions, stresses, attacks, or compromises on systems that use or are enabled by cyber resources.
The point of cyber resiliency is to enable mission or business objectives that depend on cyber resources to be achieved in a contested cyber environment.
Why is cyber resilience so important?
The very reality of such a contested cyber environment underlines the importance of cyber resilience.
Indeed, business leaders don’t just perceive cyber risk as increasing. Cyber risk is actually increasing.
In fact, according to most metrics, it’s increasing like never before.
How do we know?
According to RiskBased Security, data breaches exposed 22 billion records in 2021.
By Q3 2022, data breaches were rising by 70 per cent globally.
Add to that, associated cost keeps increasing, too, ballooning over 20 per cent per year, according to the World Economic Forum.
As it stands, the average global cost of a data breach to businesses reached $4.35 million in 2022.
The benefits of cyber resiliency
The benefits of cyber resiliency, therefore, aren’t hard to understand. They include:
Cyber resiliency saves money.
For one, cyber resiliency is a good insurance policy. If a single breach can set you back millions, why not invest in the right tools to better anticipate adverse attacks?
Cyber resiliency ensures compliance.
Part of the growing cost comes from the regulatory costs associated with cyber breaches. Indeed, here we see state, national, and supranational entities generating more regulations with serious financial penalties attached. In certain jurisdictions, companies who’ve been breached and don’t report in a timely manner stand to lose percentages of their revenue.
Cyber resiliency protects reputations.
And there’s a reputational cost, as well. Not only regulators but customers and partners also look askance at companies who’ve been breached. They consider cyber resiliency a must-have and see companies who’ve been breached as lacking it and therefore unworthy of their patronage.
Digital technology to help build cyber resilience
How then to avoid paying the penalty, whether monetary or reputational, by becoming cyber resilient?
Here, operational security management software can help companies achieve significant risk and security management goals, with one of those resilience-ensuring goals being timely breach notifications.
Notifying stakeholders (i.e., regulators, customers, and partners) in a timely manner once breached is often the signal compliance driver. Not just that it tends to demonstrate to the wider public of potential customers that you’re serious about cyber resilience.
So, what are the required digital capabilities? Download our Guide to Improving Cyber Incident Response and Management to find out.
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