Resilia - Cyber Resilience Best Practices

Operating under a constant threat of cyber attacks is the new normal for many organizations in today’s virtual business environment. These attacks can come from anywhere, from anybody and at any time. It is no longer a question of reacting to and then fixing the problem. Today the question is “How do we prepare the entire organization to be prepared and vigilant to deal with cyber security threats each and every day.

A defensive approach is no longer adequate. A proactive strategy by cyber security teams with the appropriate expertise, capabilities and best practice processes and policies is an absolute must have in order to meet the challenge of recurring engagement with those whose intent is to harm the organization in some way. There must be well defined and documented processes to prevent, where possible, detect and respond with control and countermeasures as quickly as possible while predicting what will happen next. The introduction of effective cyber resilience requires a top down approach with strong support from the C-level executive suites who must define risk tolerance and then, along with IT and other stakeholders, define a balanced strategy of risk assessment and mitigation.

Resilia (a cyber resilience lifecycle) is based on the ITIL service management lifecycle and covers a wide range of cyber resilience best practices and can be used to support a cyber resilience strategy which will encompass prevention, detection, correction and recovery from attacks. It is a collaborative approach which includes all resources and stakeholders across an organizations value network.

At its core are the three main characteristics of confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information (CIA). Confidentiality, ensures that data and information is not made available to unauthorized individuals or organizations. Integrity, is the characteristic of information that ensures it is accurate and the quality of it being correct. Availability is a characteristic of information that ensures it can be used when needed by authorized personnel. Additionally we also are concerned about authentication which is verification that a characteristic or attribute which appears to be true, or is claimed to be true, is in fact true.

We will be introducing more on Resilia in future blogs.

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