Cyber resilience is an organization’s ability to prepare for, respond to, and recover from cyberattacks and other digital disruptions while continuing to deliver its core services.
What Is Cyber Resilience?
Cyber resilience is an organization’s ability to prepare for, respond to, and recover from cyberattacks and other digital disruptions while continuing to deliver its core services. It goes beyond simply trying to keep attackers out, and assumes that some incidents will get through, focusing instead on how quickly and completely the business can bounce back with its data, systems, and reputation intact.
Cyber Resilience vs. Cybersecurity
Cybersecurity is largely about prevention, using tools like firewalls, access controls, and endpoint protection to keep attackers out in the first place. Cyber resilience assumes that some attacks will eventually get through despite those defenses, so it adds recovery, continuity, and adaptability into the equation. A cyber-resilient organization treats its security controls as one layer of a larger strategy that also includes detection, incident response, and the ability to restore clean, trustworthy data after an event like a ransomware attack.
Key Pillars of a Cyber Resilience Strategy
Most frameworks describe cyber resilience in terms of five connected capabilities:
The Role of Immutable, Air-Gapped Storage in Cyber Resilience
Recovery is only as good as the data behind it, and ransomware increasingly targets backups first, encrypting or deleting them before attackers ever reveal themselves. Immutable storage locks backup data so it can’t be altered or deleted, even from an administrator account that has been compromised, for a set retention period. Air-gapped copies take this further by isolating a copy of the data from the production network entirely, so it can’t be reached by malware that has already spread laterally. Together, they give an organization a clean, trustworthy copy to recover from, which is why immutable and air-gapped backup have become standard components of a cyber resilience strategy. Zadara’s storage and backup solutions are built with this kind of resilience in mind, pairing enterprise-class storage with backup options designed to keep a trustworthy recovery point available even if the rest of the environment is compromised.
FAQ
Is cyber resilience the same as disaster recovery?
No. Disaster recovery typically focuses on restoring IT systems after any disruptive event, including natural disasters and hardware failures. Cyber resilience is specific to digital threats and includes the ongoing ability to detect and adapt to attacks, not just recover from them.
How is cyber resilience measured?
Organizations typically track metrics such as recovery time objective (RTO), recovery point objective (RPO), the share of critical systems covered by tested recovery plans, and how quickly a real or simulated incident is detected and contained.
Do small businesses need a cyber resilience strategy?
Yes. Attackers frequently target smaller organizations because they tend to have weaker defenses and less capacity to recover without outside help, and a prolonged outage can be more damaging to a small business’s finances and reputation than it would be to a larger one.