Cyber resilience vs. cybersecurity
In recent years, organizations around the globe have been understandably focused on cybersecurity. Threats continue to grow in severity, and cyber criminals are capable of launching devastating, more sophisticated attacks on even the most vigilant companies. The size of the average organizational attack surface has grown as well, thanks to digital transformation and ever-larger vendor footprints. To survive in this new era, companies must evolve their focus on cybersecurity to a commitment to cyber resilience.
Being resilient in the face of cyber threats requires comprehensive security programs and continual efforts to mitigate risk. Bitsight can help – with solutions for continuously monitoring security performance, measuring security controls, mitigating supply chain risk, and quantifying cyber risk for business leaders.
How to build cyber resilience
Cyber resilience requires an adaptive approach to security that helps security organizations quickly adapt to the latest threats without impacting business performance. In contrast to traditional security programs that focus on remediating issues, adaptive security achieves cyber resilience through continuous monitoring and reducing risk at the root cause. By quickly uncovering anomalies, malicious traffic, and vulnerabilities in the attack surface, security teams can block potential risks from becoming detrimental through root-cause analysis and predictive analytics.
To maintain cyber resilience through adaptive security, organizations should focus on four key tasks:
Evaluate security performance 24/7
Rather than scheduling periodic cybersecurity audits, organizations can proactively manage risk by continuously monitoring IT infrastructure for vulnerabilities, such as unpatched systems, open ports, misconfigured software, and malware infections.
Continuously assess security controls
Monitoring the effectiveness of security controls can help organizations avoid the “whack-a-mole” syndrome where new issues pop up as soon as old ones are fixed. By continuously assessing the effectiveness of every security control even when imminent risks aren’t present, risk managers can better understand root causes and prevent issues in the first place. For this, your team can start with some basic cyber resilience metrics like response speed.
Monitor supply chain risk
As supply chains become more interconnected, third-party risk has become a leading cause of data breaches. Traditional risk assessment tools like vendor security risk assessment questionnaires only provide a point-in-time view of supply chain risk. To achieve cyber resilience, organizations should continuously monitor the security performance of their entire third-party portfolio, looking for concerning levels of risk in the security posture of vendors.
Quantify cyber risk
Too often, cyber risk is seen by business leaders as a technology problem with no clear impact on the business. To engage executives and board members in productive discussions about cyber risk priorities and cyber resilience, organizations need tools to financially quantify the impact of risk, enabling leaders to make better decisions about security program resources and investments.