Cyber Resilience and You: How Your Organization Can Remain Functional Through Turbulent Times

Global events, such as recessions and pandemics create enormous social and economic challenges that impact organizations and their business IT in numerous and often unpredictable ways.

From employee and customer satisfaction to financial difficulties, supply chain disruption and skyrocketing cyberattacks, top-level management oversees a wide range of concerns.

As business owners aim to address multiple challenges that may be a threat to their organizations’ success, resilience is a trending buzzword.

Organizational resilience is an organization’s ability to foresee, plan for, respond to and adapt to both gradual change in their environment as well as unexpected disruptions to continue to survive and thrive.

Even during the most recent COVID-19 pandemic, organizations that already practiced methods to cultivate resilience through remote and hybrid work structures, digital acceleration and more, showed that they had the capacity to quickly recover from setbacks and have an advantage over their competitors facing the same challenges.

If you want to prioritize resiliency within your own business, one of the first steps you should take is building cyber resilience.

Cyber Resilience refers to an organization’s ability to consistently operate and deliver the desired outcome in the face of adverse cyber events. A similar concept you may have heard in the business IT space is “Business Continuity.”

Cyber Resilience Powers Transformation

According to Forrester, cyber resilience is more than just a security imperative. It’s the foundation of a strong business and brand.

This is one of the reasons why over 65% of organizations are investing in improving their cyber resiliency posture. Businesses across the globe have begun to realize that it’s time to look inward and identify and close security gaps to build a more resilient future.

While establishing cyber resilience, consider the following:

1. You must deploy tools to detect, evaluate and handle network and information system risks, including those that affect your supply chain.
2. It’s critical to identify irregularities and potential cybersecurity issues through continuous network and information system monitoring before they morph into severe threats.
3. Implementing an incident response strategy is crucial to ensure operational continuity where you can bounce back quickly even if you are the victim of a cyberattack.
4. Always ensure that your cyber resilience strategy is overseen by top management and integrated into day-to-day operations.
5. Look ahead and plan for the needs of your organization into the future so you can start laying the infrastructure today for your business needs and expansion in the future.
6. Consider trends in your industry. The IT world moves fast and being cyber resilient today is no guarantee you will be resilient in tomorrow’s market without predictive evolution.

Companies that invest in cyber resilience should expect to get the following results:

• Increased secure collaboration within the organization as well as with clients, prospects, and partners.
• Better preparedness, response and/or remediation skills in the event of a security incident.
• Improved integration of people, processes, and technology.

As a quick example let’s take a hypothetical construction company. “Bob’s Construction” has the target of expanding their company over the next two years.

Looking ahead, they know they will need to bring on more staff and equipment. They also know they will need to budget for a server upgrade to support the data load the increased workforce will create, make sure the new and existing staff are well trained in cybersecurity, and increase the capacity for network monitoring on the new workstations and support for the users.

They will also need to consider if any of their staff will need to work remotely, creating a hybrid IT workspace and bringing along new considerations to stay resilient.

As you can see, there can be many pieces to the puzzle of keeping your company cyber resilient!

Basic Steps to Improve Your Cyber Resilience

Employee training

Providing continual security awareness training to your employees enables them to identify threats and vulnerabilities. It enhances employees’ defensive abilities and prepares them to effectively deal with a crisis.

Stay current with technological advances and the threat landscape

It’s crucial to keep up with the latest technology developments and threats. If you have no understanding of what you’re up against, you can’t protect your business.

Reset your security systems

Regularly audit your digital and physical systems to identify vulnerabilities. Set the critical systems to their best available configurations to prevent unauthorized access.

Adopt advanced technologies

Legacy technologies may be ineffective in dealing with today’s challenges. As a result, having the most up-to-date and effective technologies and tools to secure your organization is critical.

Partner with an IT MSP

Resiliency is no longer a choice but a necessity. It’s always best to collaborate with an expert IT company like Sequentur who can handle all resiliency and technology matters for you.

While cyber resilience is an ever-increasing vital aspect of doing business in the modern world, this can be a lot for many businesses to take on and implement internally. That is why it is almost always makes more sense from a technical and even financial stance to partner with an expert IT service provider for all these services.

Taking the load off yourself and your staff will give you the peace of mind of knowing it is being done correctly by friendly professionals who specialize in it.

As a professional hybrid IT workspace provider offering the full range of managed IT services, we would be happy be your IT partner, collaborating with you every step of the way to reach your business goals.

If you’re ready to take the first step towards building cyber resiliency in your organization but aren’t sure where to start, contact us today to schedule a no-obligation consultation.

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