You have the best cyber defenses and security controls in place, and they have done a good job in protecting your organization from attacks and breaches. Given that no security tool or defense is 100% effective under all circumstances, what happens when these measures fail? Will the business continue to operate despite the cyberattack? What will be the impact? How long will recovery take? The answers lie in the organization’s cyber resilience strategies. These strategies adopt a proactive, always-on and agile approach to security, thereby, sensing, pre-empting, and eliminating/ minimizing disruptions.
In the new normal where cloud computing and remote work have become imperative to business continuity and growth, there is a strong need to refresh and bolster the organization’s cyber resilience strategies. Read on to find out why.
Cyber Resilience in the Cloud Era: Why Should Businesses Refresh Their Approach?
Cloud computing is revolutionizing the way the business world operates, enabling transformative goals and remote working models. However, it is the very same technologies, networks and services that make the cloud more powerful that are becoming sources of new vulnerabilities. This is the cloud security conundrum.
Under these circumstances, even organizations with mature cloud security practices find it challenging to maintain a consistent security posture. On the other end, organizations in the midst of cloud adoption and digital transformation are having a tough time balancing their business needs and security efforts.
With digital customer engagement and remote work becoming an imperative, organizations have had to provide access to mission-critical assets and data. Today, the network is borderless with a growing number of endpoints. There is no secure enterprise network and secure devices on which data and assets are being accessed.
There is greater dependence on third-party services, software, and components today. This has increased the dependencies and the complexity of transactions. If any of the third-party service providers face an outage/ downtime/ attack, the likelihood of supply chain disruptions increases.
Traditional approaches and legacy security technologies do not work. Further, threat actors have equipped themselves with the most advanced technologies and tools to orchestrate attacks of new kinds and increase the sophistication and lethality of known attack methods.
In today’s day and age, security technology is not impenetrable. A whole new range of vulnerabilities, threats and security risks have emerged. So, disaster recovery plans and cyber resilience strategies based on the idea that security is impenetrable or that organizations have secure networks as an extra layer of protection need to be reimagined.
Further, there is no room for downtimes. The cost of downtime is estimated at over USD 200,000 per hour! This includes the cost of business disruptions, loss of public trust, reputational damage, etc. Businesses must build always-on, intelligent and agile cybersecurity and resiliency strategies into their cloud-based IT environment.
How to Bolster Resiliency in the New Era?
Paradigm Shift in Approach to Cybersecurity
Organizations must transform their outlook to security, making it intelligent, always-on, integrated, agile and scalable.
The use of intelligent automation and analytics enables organizations to infuse scalability, intelligence, and agility into their cyber resilience strategies. While intelligent automation infuses speed into the identification of vulnerabilities, asset discovery, virtual patching, data monitoring and behavior and pattern analysis, among others, security analytics help in quick and swift decision-making. Automation further helps ensure that security is always-on, whenever and wherever data and assets are being accessed.
In fact, data suggests that organizations with more mature cloud security journeys employ 6x more security automation than those that are beginning their cloud security journey. These organizations are known to perform twice as better in the threat remediation lifecycle than those who are just starting out.
Adopting a unified approach towards building the security architecture enables organizations to gain full visibility into their ever-expanding IT environment and their security posture in one place. So, it is easy for organizations to monitor and govern assets and data while improving their security outcomes and resilience.
Building a Zero Trust Architecture
Given the borderless nature of the IT environment today, traditional ideas of network perimeter security do not work. Organizations need to build a zero-trust architecture. Instead of assuming that some actors would not indulge in illegal activities, the zero-trust approach focuses on always verifying users. It stresses on the need for greater visibility, robust identity and access management, actionable analytics, and incident response.
Shared Responsibility
The cloud ecosystem is distributed across various assets, data stores, service providers, networks, and devices, among others. There needs to be greater accountability and information sharing among different stakeholders. In an era where collaboration and connectivity are vital, shared responsibility among different stakeholders and community-based security models help bolster cyber resilience.
The Way Forward
Rethink and refresh cyber resilience with Indusface now to gain competitive and strategic advantages!