What is Cyber Resilience?
Cyber resilience refers to your business’ capacity to prevent, detect, handle, and recover from a cyber incident. Essentially, it’s how effectively you’re prepared to deal with an attack including mitigating damage and supporting business continuity. Cyber resilience also contributes to a strong cyber security culture within your business, provides a competitive advantage, and builds trust with clients and partners.
5 Ways to Build a Cyber Resilient Business
- Implement multi-layered security
Layering security measures reduces vulnerabilities and ensures you can adapt to changing threats, combining relevant preventative and responsive solutions to protect your business’ IT environment. It means that if a hacker bypasses a layer, there are more barriers in place to stop them or mitigate the impact of an attack. Layers should encompass security across your network, endpoints, applications, data, staff’s cyber awareness (we talk about this below), and more. Multi-layered security also plays a part in helping you achieve and maintain compliance.
- Educate employees with regular training
95% of cyber incidents involve human error, so if your staff aren’t educated around common cyber threats and how they should deal with them, they’re a weak link in your cyber security. Regular training around risks and best practices improves cyber awareness, and ensures they can make the right decisions when faced with threats like phishing emails or social engineering attacks. This practice is also key to strengthen and promote your business’ cyber security culture.
- Regularly back up data and test data recovery
Data backups are essential to promote business continuity and avoid data loss when a cyber attack, such as malware or ransomware, strikes. Without them, you’re left dealing with costly downtime that disrupts daily operations. Data should be backed up regularly to multiple locations and tested for reliability.
- Keep software and systems up to date
While ignoring system and software updates might be a habit for many, staying on top of them is important to repair security vulnerabilities that hackers can otherwise target and exploit. In fact, 60% of data breaches and 32% of ransomware attacks involve unpatched software and systems. Keeping everything up to date boosts security and functionality, and you can switch on automatic updates to simplify the process.
- Develop and test an incident response plan
A clear incident response plan is instrumental in the event of a cyber attack, providing structure and assigning responsibilities that guide the detection, response, and recovery process for your business. This written strategy should cover a range of relevant attacks, such as data breaches, ransomware, phishing, and insider threats. It helps to lessen the impact and length of an incident, so you can reduce downtime and resultant costs. All of this plays a significant role in maintaining your business’ reputation and customer relationships.
How Bekkers Can Help
Ready to make cyber resilience a priority? As a Technology Services Partner, we take security seriously and align your business to the best industry standards including the Essential Eight. Get in touch with us today and we can get the ball rolling, ensuring we tick off the each of the above areas and more so you can be confident in business continuity. We’re looking forward to working with you and supporting the long-term success of your business.
