Disruption to your sales process
What is Cyber Resilience
Cyber resilience is a measure of an organisation’s ability to manage a cyber attack or data leak whilst continuing to operate as usual. Organisation’s must have the ability to recover quickly from cyber attacks, such as a ransomware assault, and resume normal operations.
According to Mimecast’s The State of Email Security Report 2020 organisations are still seeing data loss (31%), a negative impact to employee productivity (31%), and business downtime (29%) due to a lack of cyber resilience.
The goal of cyber resilience is to actively safeguard your entire organisation, taking into account all of your infrastructure’s insecure components.
Leveraging automated cyber security tools, implementing security processes and monitoring and managing around the clock can ensure you’re cyber resilient.
If you’re fully prepared you’ll be able to secure your operations, decrease your exposure to cyber threats, and mitigate the impact of attacks.
Why Cyber Resilience Matters
When employees are unable to access data stored on the network or on company issued devices, the effect is more than just lost productivity. Downtime and system outages can have an impact on how you connect with customers and partners. It could result in you losing out to a significant competitor during a crucial stage of talks, as well as a tarnished reputation and diminished credibility. When downtime occurs frequently, it depletes IT resources and diverts IT personnel away from other critical strategic objectives.
As a result, while calculating the true cost of downtime, you must consider more than just the hourly cost of affected customers; the consequences could be vast:
- Loss of customers
- Disruption to business activities
- Lawsuits and fines
- Compromised sensitive data
- Financial loss
- Reputational damage & credibility
- Risk to patient care
Measures to Strengthen Cyber Resilience
It’s a good idea to have processes and tools in place to achieve cyber resilience and to continually check and verify:
- Create an inventory of existing assets
Start by recording your assets and the security measures you need to implement to ensure they are secured.
- Train employees
Phishing assaults are still the most common way for malware to spread. Employees are tricked into downloading dangerous code using deceptive emails, attachments, and web links. Ensure employees are fully trained & vigilant.
- Implement antivirus software
A sophisticated corporate antivirus solution employs cutting-edge technology to identify, prevent, and remediate dangerous threats.
- Set up company wide backup policies
Relying on users will eventually result in data loss. Backups on a regular basis can be the difference between paying tens of thousands of pounds in ransom and recovering your data without the need to do so.
- Use the cloud
Cloud computing is hugely beneficial to businesses as it improves efficiency, reduces operational headaches and decreases costs, however it’s important ensure that data flow to/from the cloud is secured.
- Secure remote access
Remote access to files has proven to be critical for business continuity with so many employees now working from home. Ensure users can access files remotely & securely.
- Visibility
Have consistent detailed visibility across all of your environments so that you are aware of vulnerabilities and threats to your business.
- 24x7 monitoring
Consider using a managed service, especially if you don’t have the resources available internally, they can provide peace of mind and ensure quick responses.
- Implement pen testing
Improve your protection against cyber attacks by checking continuously for vulnerabilities and prioritising remediation.
- Patch management
Attacks on critical systems are on the rise and emerging threats make it difficult to keep up-to-date with patching. You need to ensure that patches are applied as soon as is reasonably possible.
- Red team testing
Red teams run targeted testing to assist with risk discovery, compliance checks and to verify any results.
- Continual reporting
Ensure you are constantly vigilant by obtaining frequent vulnerability reports giving you actionable insights and analytics.
How to Achieve Cyber Resilience with Automated Security Testing
Continuous automated testing is an invaluable solution for securely testing your systems, networks and applications by emulating cyber attacks. In a matter of hours you can identify where you are most vulnerable, prioritise remediation and assess how your security has improved, or not, over time.
You can continuously assess and reduce your cyber security risk by frequently testing and acting upon the results.
Automated security testing can significantly improve your cyber resilience on a continuous basis by carrying out the following:
- Vulnerability scanning
Identifies gaps in security and potential exploitation.
- Ethical hacking
Active exploitation & post exploitation of your network.
- Step-by-step visualisation of attack vectors
Gives complete visibility of the kill chain, clarifying what needs to be fixed & the immediate impact of the fix on breaking the kill chain.
- Remediation
Assign & prioritise suggested remediation to members of your team.
- Instantaneous comprehensive reporting
Overview of your overall security posture assessment and top hacking achievements, plus the most cost-effective remediation actions to be taken.
- Unlimited testing & unlimited users
Test in development & UAT environments, plus regular ongoing testing.
- Fast, intelligent web crawling
Scans your external network infrastructure & detects critical web application flaws.
- Covers all known vulnerability classes
Including all of the OWASP Top Ten
How to Achieve Cyber Resilience with Manual Security Testing
Whether implemented internally or establishing a strategic partnership with a 24×7 managed cyber security service, manual testing helps to achieve your security objectives and compliance obligations, critical to running your business and protecting your customers.
Manual testing can significantly reduce the risk of an attack and ensure you can recover quickly from any breaches by carrying out the following:
- Managed detection response
Active threat hunting identifies potential areas of compromise. Works as an extension to your security team, providing faster incident response times.
- Security testing and assessment
Red team testing discovers vulnerabilities, checks compliance and verifies findings.
- Social Engineering
Monitor emails/telephones for attempts to gain credentials or access.
- Critical asset mgt-as-a-service
Firewall / Endpoint / O35 (& more). Monitoring & management with 24×7 access to skilled security experts as an extension of your security team. Full incident analysis, remediation, change control & system updates/upgrades.
- Patch management-as-a-service
Full unified patching across your organisation securing all endpoints and infrastructure.
Real-time analysis of security events generated across your entire infrastructure.
- SOC
Defend against advanced and complex security threats with a 24×7 cyber security centre that monitors, alerts and remediates, giving complete visibility and control.
Combined Automated & Manual Security Testing
Combining automated and manual testing with internal business processes helps you to continuously validate your overall security posture whenever you wish to (daily, weekly, monthly), with minimal in-house resource (i.e. one person for a few hours), and without needing to be experts in all areas of cyber security.
Combined with the support of a dedicated managed service that’s focused on monitoring and managing your critical assets around the clock, you get the best of both worlds, whilst also being in a position where instantaneous reporting as a result of automation empowers you with the intelligence needed to hold the service, and other vendors to account.
As the effects of a data breach can be technical, social, and financial, every business must prioritise cyber resilience by integrating business processes with IT. The data and technologies that drive our digital economy are critical to business success.
Being cyber resilient now will help to avoid disaster in the future.
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EmergeCyber
Adamson House
Towers Business Park
Wilmslow Road
Didsbury
Manchester
M20 2YY
Contact Us
Tel: +44 (0)161 870 6662
Sales: letstalk@emergecyber.com
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It stood out to me when you talked about how cloud computing can be used to ensure that data that flows in and out of it can be secured. If you want to utilize cloud computing, I would imagine that it would be a good idea to find a technology solutions company to work with. As far as I know, you can pay these companies a certain amount of money a month to use their cloud services that are on servers.