Improving Your Organization's Cyber Resilience

Among the more popular buzzwords or phrases circulating the IT operations space is “cyber resilience.” Though seemingly autological, cyber resilience encompasses a large number of different things that must work together well in order to yield favorable outcomes. Defined generally, cyber resilience is an entity’s ability to continuously deliver an intended result, despite adverse cyber events. There are a number of important cyber resiliency techniques as established by the National Institute of Standards and Technology that work to achieve that aim. Such techniques include:

• Adaptive Response. The ability to respond quickly to issues.
• Analytic Monitoring. The detection of adverse actions and subsequent response to such.
• Coordinated Protection. Implementation of strategies that create obstacles for adversaries.
• Diversity. Use of heterogeneity to minimize common mode failures.
• Dynamic positioning. Diversifying network distribution in order to improve the ability to rapidly recover.
• Dynamic representation. Keep representation of the network current. 
• Privilege restriction. Restrict user privileges on the basis of attributes and systems.
• Realignment. Minimize the connections between mission-critical and noncritical services.
• Redundancy. Provide multiple instances of critical resources.
• Segmentation. Create separations between system elements and categorize them based on importance and trustworthiness. 
• Unpredictability. Make unexpected changes at random. This will increase an adversary’s level of uncertainty regarding system protections.

Any organization that incorporates technological processes in its operations environment should place focus on these things. However, for the purposes of simplicity, we have boiled these techniques down to three fundamental pillars that provide a suitable construct upon which an organization can begin to strengthen its cyber resilience.

1. Data Safety

One of the key components of data safely is building secure software quickly that integrates seamlessly with your current tools and processes. Securing data should not disrupt your current workflows, rather it should accompany them down the path to greater efficiency. Through the encryption of both structured and unstructured data as well as round-the-clock, persistent protection, risks can be greatly reduced and data breach costs, effectively eliminated. 

2. Detection and Response

You’ll notice that there are two constituent parts to this pillar. While accelerating and improving threat detection is vital to a healthy IT environment, the response to such threats can be even more critical. Being able to leverage unsupervised machine learning to automate response and build upon human intelligence can improve security and efficiency by leaps and bounds. When it comes to threat detection and response, manual, people-driven processes are frankly too laborsome and opens the door to a number of vulnerabilities. Automation is certainly the direction you want to travel in.

3. Adaptation

Utilizing data science to deliver evolving, relevant outcomes is imperative in order to keep an organization moving forward into the future. It is no secret that technology is constantly changing. With the evolution of technology comes the evolution of threats that are engineered to adapt to the new wave of machine intelligence. This means that technology solutions, especially those that manage security processes, need to be adaptive as well. Little time needs to pass before once-best practices and existing controls become outdated. 

Choose a Trusted Partner

When it comes to improving cyber resilience, there are one of two avenues an organization can pursue. They can either learn the ins and outs of cybersecurity, back-end troubleshooting, process monitoring, and more— or they can rely on experienced professionals to provide the proper solutions. For those interested in pursuing the latter avenue, GreenLight Group is here to help. If your organization has unique IT automation needs, reach out to us. We would be happy to discuss with you the many flexible solutions we provide and customize a process that meets your enterprise service management demands.