Cyber resilience: How to prepare your business for cyber disruptions

Cyberattacks are now so common that any business should expect to be targeted. An effective cybersecurity strategy can prevent or stop the vast majority of these attacks, but it’s likely that at least some will succeed enough to cause meaningful disruption to your work.

So, how do you keep operations running, limit damage and maintain business continuity after a successful attack occurs? By implementing a cyber risk management strategy that’s built on cyber resilience as well as cybersecurity.

Keep reading to learn more about what that means and how to get started.

What is cyber resilience?

Cyber resilience is the practice of preparing your business to continue operating normally or recover more quickly in the event of a cyberattack. Prioritizing cyber resilience will make it easier to maintain business continuity and avoid damaging ripple effects in the event that your systems are breached or compromised.

Cyber resilience is deeply intertwined with cybersecurity and is usually implemented by cybersecurity professionals. However, it’s important to consider resilience as a distinct goal because it emphasizes a different aspect of cyber risk management than most cybersecurity efforts do.

Cybersecurity versus cyber resilience: What’s the difference?

Cybersecurity and cyber resilience are both essential components of an effective cyber risk management strategy. But they have different objectives. Cybersecurity efforts aim to stop cyberattacks from succeeding, while cyber resilience planning accepts that some cyberattacks may succeed, and focuses on preparing your business to navigate the aftermath with minimal disruption.

Why cyber resilience matters for business leaders

Implementing an effective cyber resilience strategy can help your business to more effectively weather the storm of a successful cyberattack. This can help mitigate the hit to your bottom line, protect your reputation with partners and customers, preserve business continuity and more.

Financial impact

In addition to the direct costs of a cyberattack (like a ransom payment), a successful attack that disrupts your normal operations can cost you sales, customers, opportunities, production downtime and other losses that affect your balance sheet. The more resilient your business, the less you’ll be affected by these financial ripple effects.

Industry reputation

A cyberattack can affect your reputation with potential partners, buyers, lenders and entities with whom you want to do business. However, if your business is able to shake off an attack more quickly, you’ll likely take significantly less of a reputational hit.

Customer trust

Depending on your industry, a cyberattack can make a notable impact on the extent to which your customers or clients trust you. But an attack that doesn’t significantly disrupt your customers’ experience will likely be forgotten much more quickly, preserving the trust you’ve built up over time.

Operational continuity

Certain types of cyberattacks, like ransomware attacks, specifically seek to interfere with your normal operations so that you’re forced to pay a ransom to resume business as usual. Cyber resilience practices like regular data backups and properly protecting those backups can help you limit the extent of such operational disruptions.

Regulatory complications

Regulators want to see you taking responsible, proactive action to not just prevent attacks, but protect your customers, data and operations in the event that an attack succeeds. Especially in regulated industries, businesses that embrace this approach will be looked on more favorably when evaluated by regulators in the aftermath of an attack.

How does business continuity planning support cyber resilience?

Business continuity planning is the planning stage of your cyber resilience strategy. Creating, implementing and updating an active business continuity plan will give your business a roadmap to strengthen your cyber resilience so you can better maintain operations during and after an attack.

As cyberthreats and IT solutions continue to evolve, organizations need to prioritize business continuity planning to protect sensitive data and critical operations. This work should be considered a critical part of not just your cybersecurity efforts, but your overall enterprise risk management strategy.

How to build a cyber resilience strategy

Building an effective cyber resilience strategy is a multistage process that involves identifying risks or challenge areas, creating a business continuity plan to address them and implementing your plan on an ongoing basis. Here are key steps:

Engage a cybersecurity and cyber resilience advisor

Cyber resilience work involves taking an unsparing look at your current systems, policies and processes and making necessary changes to protect your business. Collaborating with a cybersecurity advisor can help you identify risks, governance gaps and problem areas that your internal team might not notice and then implement a more effective plan to become more resilient.

Identify critical business processes

Identify your core systems, processes, people and operational capabilities. This is what your business needs to operate normally — so it’s what you need to be resilient against a cyberattack.

Assess cyber risks and business impacts

Consider how various types of cyberattacks, ranging from a successful email compromise and data breach to a full-bore ransomware attack, would affect your business. This will help you identify specific gaps and problem areas you need to address.

Develop and test a business continuity plan

Work with your advisor to develop a business continuity plan to make your business more cyber resilient. This plan should address how you’ll respond to a cyberattack, including action steps by key personnel, and should also include long-term or ongoing actions like regular data backups.

Strengthen incident response and recovery

Implement the ongoing elements of your business continuity plan to strengthen your overall resilience. You should also regularly practice the elements of your plan that involve how you would respond in the immediate aftermath of an attack.

Continuously monitor and improve resilience

Like cybersecurity, cyber resilience is an ongoing process rather than a one-time event. Continue to assess your level of cyber resilience to make improvements when needed.

Common challenges to building cyber resilience

Certain common challenges can make it harder to implement a successful cyber resilience framework or strategy. Watch out for:

• Limited leadership: Cyber resilience needs a champion at the executive level. This will often be your CIO or CISO, who will lead your resilience efforts and help their fellow executives understand the business value.
• Underestimating value: If your C-suite thinks of cybersecurity as just an IT problem, it may not understand the financial, operational and reputational benefits of investing in cyber resilience.
• Inexperience: Your in-house team may lack the capability to fully assess your business from a cyber risk perspective or implement an effective resilience strategy. Leaning on a cybersecurity advisor can help you overcome this challenge.
• Compliance focus: The most effective cybersecurity and resilience work looks at cyber as a business risk and not just a compliance activity. If you’re just focused on checking compliance boxes, you may think you’re protected while missing major risk areas.
• Siloed teams: Cyber resilience affects your entire business, including your leadership, so your business continuity plan can’t just be a siloed IT effort.
• Outdated business continuity plan: Your business continuity plan should be a living document rather than something you write and then stick in a drawer. Otherwise, it may not reflect your current risk environment.
• AI-related risks: Weak AI governance can expose your business to AI-related risks like shadow AI (in which your team shares your data with unauthorized AI tools). This can expose you to risks you may not even be aware of until after a problem occurs.

Cyber resilience best practices

Here are four best practices that can help make your business more resilient against a successful cyberattack.

1. Conduct risk and vulnerability assessments

Your organization can start your plan by assessing your cybersecurity risks and vulnerabilities so that you’re better equipped to address them.

To help you better understand your vulnerabilities, your organization should:

• Conduct a threat assessment: A comprehensive threat assessment is vital to understanding your organization’s cybersecurity posture. It can help you better identify and prepare for internal and external threats that could potentially exploit vulnerabilities in your systems.
• Identify critical assets and systems: Your organization should create an inventory of all hardware, software, peripheral devices and removable media — including those belonging to third-party providers — that are critical to your operations. This inventory should also detail who is responsible for each asset, where it is stored and its purpose.
• Evaluate current security measures: Assessing your existing security measures is vital to identify gaps and areas for improvement.

2. Create a comprehensive business continuity plan

Developing a comprehensive plan that covers all areas of your operations can help you effectively respond to and recover from cyber incidents. Your plan should serve as a roadmap for all your teams, not just cybersecurity and IT professionals, and provide clear instructions on:

• Roles and responsibilities: Your plan will need to help create a coordinated response with individuals from across your organization, including IT professionals, operations personnel, human resources representatives, communications experts and management. You also need to include defined roles and responsibilities so that everyone understands their place on the team and the actions they need to take during an outage or security incident.

• Communication protocols: Effective communication is critical when navigating a cyber incident. Your organization should develop a comprehensive communication plan that reaches all affected audiences, including staff, customers, investors or other stakeholders.

3. Establish data backup and recovery strategies

A robust data recovery strategy is crucial for protecting sensitive data and maintaining operational resilience or speeding recovery after an incident.

To help ensure that your data is accessible in the event of an outage, consider using a data protection strategy such as the 3-2-1 backup rule. This strategy involves maintaining three copies of your critical data, storing them on two different types of storage media and keeping one copy off-site. By adhering to this rule, your organization can avoid having a single point of failure for your data and improve your ability to recover or access data during an incident.

Your organization can also consider cloud-based backup solutions. These services provide off-site storage, helping ensure that data remains accessible even if on-premises systems are compromised.

Regardless of your backup methods, your organization should regularly test your recovery process to validate the effectiveness of your data protection.

4. Conduct business continuity planning training

Even the most well-built plan will not be effective if your staff doesn’t understand it. Prioritizing staff training and testing your response capabilities can help your organization enhance resilience and strengthen cyber defenses.

Cyberattack simulations are one option for providing a more hands-on approach to testing your organization’s readiness. Options like tabletop exercises allow teams to practice their roles and responsibilities during an incident without real-world pressure. They can also help you identify any vulnerabilities in your plan, systems or processes.

How Wipfli can help

We advise businesses on managing risk, strengthening cybersecurity and bolstering cyber resilience. Let’s talk about how we can help your business become safer and stronger. Start a conversation.

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