Build Resilience

Withstand all.

 

One of the most important things a cyber security practice can do is to keep the organization it serves running.

Business continuity – in the face of cyberattacks, breaches and incidents – must be ensured and interruptions minimized. Good cyber security safeguards people, operations, and businesses and prepares for possible future attacks.

The core capabilities of resilience in strong cyber security teams are:

Anticipation

Your team has excellent situational awareness and the information needed to prepare for and defeat attacks, both in advance and in real-time.

Continuation

Your organization’s mission isn’t affected and business-critical functions carry on, even in the face of a successful cyber attack.

Recovery

Your team, and the organization as a whole, bounces back to normality quickly and effectively after a breach.

Adaptation

The heart of successful resilience. Your organization has the space and time to continually test, learn, improve, and work towards minimizing impacts and risks from threats in an agile manner.

Here’s how to help turn your organization’s resilience imperative from a reactive to proactive and then progressive outcome-based approach, from least to most mature:

Reactive / threat-based resilience

If your team is at this stage, you probably have a change plan forming or in place: your team is caught up constantly patching, monitoring, detecting and responding, often as incidents and breaches take place.

It’s a painful place to be, but also something all teams go through from time to time: your primary focus is on rectifying immediate incidents and preventing them from happening again. Therefore, you want to hit, or return to, the next stage:

 

Proactive or Risk- and Asset-based resilience

Congratulations! You’re over the crest of the wave and no longer reacting. Your team is concerned with managing your organization’s attack surface and identifying security threats and weaknesses before they happen. It can either do this alone or -more likely - with the help of managed services and other outsourced capabilities.

The team tracks, assesses and, assigns a priority to major risks, and there’s a program and culture in place to maintain security controls that help you mitigate these risks. You’re ready for the next step:

Progressive or Outcome-based resilience

Your cyber security team’s primary role and responsibility is twofold: Minimize risk and getting the most value from good security. How? Well, you’ve risen above the complexities of day-to-day cyber security, tackled skills shortages, and can take a ‘Yes, and…’ approach to contributing to organizational strategies.

This last capability is critical; it ensures your organization has a strong cyber security running through its heart, and cyber security goals and activities are truly interlined with business targets and key activities – and are followed up.

A real test of success is that this approach has spread beyond your cyber security team and is simply part of the organization’s culture. It also contributes to the next two outcomes: Competitiveness and Productivity.

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Identify Your Response Gap

Do you have the capability to respond to an attack before it escalates to a major incident? Take a short risk assessment and get a tailored report about your risk levels - with practical recommendations on how you can develop your capabilities and processes.

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Endpoint detection and response (EDR) is critical to your business as attacks are becoming more sophisticated and the attack surface much larger. Understand the reasons why you should implement EDR.

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Our new mini-series—Red Team Diaries—tells the story of a red team engagement using real experiences from one of our expert consultants, Tom Van de Wiele.
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Automating security responses often gets a great response time – right down to milliseconds in some cases. Doing this creates all kinds of new problems and a fast response is not always the best way to dislodge a sophisticated attacker. 

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What are Security Outcomes?

Most businesses stumble from one cyber security crisis to another. It’s hardly surprising: as security budgets continue to grow in the face of threats, security leaders must constantly justify the needed to defeat these threats. 

In a Forrester study conducted on behalf of WithSecure, 60% of security decision-makers said they were in reactive mode and failing when it came to cyber.

Escaping this cycle of reactive behavior, and improving visibility of threats beyond just an attack surface or network perimeter is vital to improving any organization’s cyber security. But even that is not enough.

Outcome based security steps beyond the immediate need to defend, and demonstrates how cyber security can help actively support the pursuit of organizational goals. The need is already clear and present: 83% of respondents in the same Forrester poll wanted to adopt outcome-based cyber security approaches.  

We’re going to give you the blueprint to elevate your strategic thinking to:

Build resilience

Worry less with secured and resilient processes that scale in the cloud.

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Improve competitiveness

Win more business by upgrading your customer experience, compliance and reputation.

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Supercharge productivity

Waste fewer resources through simplified, optimized, and sustainable security.

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