As organisations continue to invest in cybersecurity protection, many still do not have a proper cyber resilience strategy. Besides the lack of awareness, one possible drawback is that a lot of businesses, especially SMEs, do not have access to huge funding for a cyber resilience program. They normally just opt for the basic cybersecurity protection software with the hopes that it can sufficiently protect their business from being a victim of cyber attacks.

So what happens to organisations without a cyber resiliency plan when a cybersecurity breach occurs? In most cases, these businesses end up facing huge losses due to the amount of time they spend trying to recover their systems to get their business back up and running. Given this ever-present threat from cybercriminals, businesses can’t just rely on being reactive to attacks. They need to be able to harden themselves against cyber incidents and strengthen their cyber resilience posture.

Implementing the cyber resilience lifecycle, based on the industry standard NIST framework, will allow businesses to have continuity if they become victims of a cyber attack. There are five key areas in this lifecycle; identify, protect, detect, respond, and recover. The cycle begins by being able to identify cybersecurity risks by accessing your cyber resiliency readiness, process and posture to orchestrate and automate your recovery workflow.

The automation process will protect against attacks by discovering threats before they are able to cause harm. This includes disrupting malware and exploits, discovering and patching systems as well as automatically fixing vulnerabilities. Businesses need to be able to detect unknown threats with advanced analytics, giving them the advantage to not just see attacks across their business but also rapidly investigate active threats and detect incoming attacks.

Cybersecurity software will engage with the treats to repel them and remediate the damages by restoring systems and closing vulnerabilities. But in order to minimise downtime and recover quickly, businesses must have a cyber incident response plan that provides specific instructions or procedures on what needs to be done should a breach occurs.

A critical part of the cyber resilience lifecycle is the recovery of critical data and applications. Instead of being left crippled by a cyber attack, businesses must be able to rapidly rebuild mission-critical business applications and restore data from back up.

The lifecycle is an important framework that businesses must put in place in order to not only have proactive safeguards in place to secure their assets but also help them reduce exposure to risk, learn from incidents and be prepared for worst-case scenarios. The good news is that this entire lifecycle process can be automated to ensure businesses achieve significant improvements in their cyber resilience.

This June, Cybersecurity Asean will be organising an exclusive executive panel discussion to share advice and experience on the best practice on managing cyber resilience in the digital economy.

The panellists will include CyberSecurity Malaysia CEO Dato’ Ts. Dr Haji Amirudin Bin Abdul Wahab and IBM’s ASEAN Security Business Unit Executive Malcolm Rowe. Group Publisher of cybersecurityasean.com Andrew Martin will moderate the roundtable.

The panel will walk through the stages of the cyber reliance lifecycle and outline how businesses can craft a cyber-resilient plan that is built on an AI-powered Security Immune System.