Leveling Up Your Cyber Resilience is a Game-Changer
Increase Your Company’s Cyber Resilience to Increase Your Chance of Survival
Cyberattacks are horror stories for companies of any size, but for small and medium businesses (SMBs) they can be devastating. An estimated 60% of businesses that fall victim to a successful cyberattack go out of business within 6 months. No one wants their organization to join those ranks, but in today’s hazardous cybercrime landscape, that’s a real possibility for every business. That’s why it is essential that companies make sensible choices that strengthen their organization’s ability to defend against cyberattacks or even just survive a damaging cybersecurity incident by increasing that company’s cyber resilience.
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What is Cyber Resilience Anyway?
IBM defines cyber resilience (called cyber resiliency in the UK) as a crucial component of IT for every modern business. A cyber resilient organization is able to stand in the face of rising threats from a variety of sources like supporting a remote workforce in volatile conditions, escalating credential compromise risk and cloud data security failures. In a cyber resilient company, business operations don’t grind to a halt in the event of a cyberattack. Instead, a cyber resilient organization can weather the storm to continue operating, respond to emergencies and quickly mitigate damage in the event of a cyberattack. Companies that are cyber resilient can increase customer confidence easily to position themselves as a secure, trustworthy partner and a model for data protection that customers can trust.
In a report released in March 2021 in MIT’s Sloan Management Review, researchers took that assessment a step further. The key insight from their research showed how cyber resilience had evolved with cybersecurity. Managing cyber resilience is no longer exclusively the responsibility of IT and security teams. Instead, as risk becomes more pervasive across company operations and functions, so has the impetus for employees to practice good security habits. following procedures and taking actions that maintain or improve cyber resilience has become part of every employee’s job, especially when it comes to things like maintaining strong credential security or handling phishing threats, today’s fastest-growing cybersecurity risk. That means that organizations need a comprehensive approach to cyber resilience – including a clear plan for how to manage risk across all aspects of the business.
Are you ready to fight back against cybercrime? See where 2021’s threats are coming from and what’s next. DOWNLOAD THE REPORT>>
What Damages Cyber Resilience
It is critical for cyber resilience that everyone knows cybersecurity priorities aren’t just the province of the IT team. In order to enforce that mindset, companies need to focus on building a strong cybersecurity culture in which everyone from the CEO to the interns knows that the company takes cybersecurity seriously with robust support for employees through security awareness training. After all, actions that are well outside the IT team’s control can cause a cybersecurity disaster like an email security breach very easily. Unfortunately, in the recently released SANS report Managing Human Cyber Risk 2021, strategic alignment is cited as one of the three biggest blockers to managing risk, with less than half of security professionals surveyed saying that they felt that they had the support that they needed from leadership to grow a strong security culture, and about 10% saying that they had no support at all.
Security awareness includes being aware of whether or not your security solutions are doing the job.If your company has too many security tools to maintain, it’s easy for security personnel to become both overwhelmed and disconnected. In this study of more than 1,000 business executives, 85% of security decision-makers said they believe they are adding technologies faster than they can productively use them, with 71% admitting most existing tools are underutilized. That’s an important vulnerability because the number of security tools that an organization was using had a negative impact on cyber resilience. Organizations using 50+ security tools ranked themselves 8% lower in their ability to detect an attack and 7% lower in their ability to respond to an attack than companies with fewer tools.
Creating and drilling a smart, sensible incident response plan is a cyber resilience essential for coping quickly with disasters like a data breach. In the same IBM survey, it was abundantly clear that companies with formal security response plans applied across the business were significantly less likely to experience significant disruption as the result of a cyberattack. Over the past two years, only 39% of companies with a formal, tested incident response plan experienced a disruptive security incident, compared to 62% of companies with less formal or consistent plans. But there’s still room for improvement for many companies with an incident response plan in place. Even if a company did have a formal security response plan, only 17% of total respondents had also developed specific playbooks for common attack types — and plans for constantly evolving attacks like ransomware were even rarer.
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How Can You Boost Your Company’s Cyber Resilience Fast?
It’s clear that cyber resilience must be a key priority for every business. But where should you start? This list of steps to take can give businesses a solid starting point for building their cyber resilience.
- Protect everyone’s credentials with multifactor authentication
- Implement a security focused procedure for data handling
- Adopt a zero-trust security model
- Determine and define cross-functional responsibilities for keeping data safe
- Set and enforce BYOD policies that prioritize information and system security
- Make a formal incident response plan with playbooks for every scenario
- Drill your incident response plan regularly and adjust it as needed to keep it current
- Automate security processes whenever possible
- Engage in regular security awareness training for every employee
- Utilize cutting-edge technology to strengthen your defenses
- Do not neglect basic maintenance like patching, auditing or configuration
- Stay current on the risks that your organization faces
Zero Trust security is a piece of cake when you’re sure you’re giving access to the right people at the right levels. SEE HOW TO DO IT>>
Multifunctional, Best-in-Class Solutions Make a Difference
Why spend time or money on a solution that just does one thing? No one has the budget to spare for solutions that are one-trick ponies. Plus, cyberattack threats have become more sophisticated than ever before. The solutions that you use to fight back and secure your company against cybercrime need to be just as sophisticated to keep up. The dynamic solutions in the ID Agent digital risk protection platform get the job done with innovative technology that solves more than one problem at an affordable price.
With Passly, you get multiple key security components in one solution at a rate far below the competition, especially when comparing to the total cost of products from multiple vendors.
- Protect credentials and ensure compliance with multifactor authentication to prevent 99% of password-based cybercrime
- Make your IT team’s job easier with Passly’s robust remote management tools, secure shared password vaults and seamless integration with popular business apps
- Make password protection simple with automated password resets and quick and easy access to SSO applications and passwords to automatically fill in credentials for web logins
Rely on BullPhish ID to deliver comprehensive security awareness training that works and reduce your company’s chance of having to use your incident response plan by up to 70%.
- Don’t just train employees about phishing –get them up to speed on threats like ransomware, smart security behaviors and compliance too.
- Make training and tracking a snap with personalized portals for every user, enabling trainers to painlessly track and assign training.
- Use premade plug-and-play kits or customize your training materials to reflect the unique industry threats that employees face daily.
Protection from dark web danger with Dark Web ID gives your security team the confidence that they’ve got credential compromise threats handled.
- Dark web search finds every compromised company credential fast, enabling you to fix them before the bad guys can exploit them
- Monitoring with 24/7/356 human and machine intelligence ensures that your team knows exactly what your company’s dark web exposure risk is in real-time
- Leverage out of-the-box integrations with popular PSA platforms, for a fast, frictionless alerting and mitigation process, so you never miss a security event.
Forewarned is Forearmed
Preparation is the magic bullet that can help an organization defeat the horrors that they’re facing from cyberattacks and survive an encounter with danger by increasing its cyber resilience. Remind everyone that cybersecurity is a team sport, and give employees the tools that they need to help maintain security. By implementing common-sense strategies to increase your cyber resilience business, everyone can rest easier at night knowing that you’ve built the strongest possible defenses against cybercrime. Our solutions specialists are here to help make that happen. Contact ID Agent today for a free, personalized demo of our smart solutions.