Market Insights: the importance of cyber resiliency with Scott Roberts, Dell
We chat with Dell’s Cyber Resilience EMEA Director, Scott Roberts about the benefits of cyber resiliency, why cyber security needs to be a priority for every organisation, and how modern working environments are changing the cyber security landscape.
What is your definition of cyber resiliency and why is it important for organisations to focus on it?
Resiliency is the capacity to withstand or recover quickly from challenges. In the world of cyber attacks, this translates to being able to continue normal business operations in the event of a successful attack.
As the threat landscape continues to mature and evolve, threat actors becoming more sophisticated, and the rewards for successful attacks being so high, we are seeing a significant increase in the frequency of attacks. This coupled with the increasingly complex attack surface that organisations have to manage, has tipped the scale in favour of threat actors successfully exploiting a vulnerability – which is why it is so important to focus on cyber resiliency.
How should organisations prioritise their cyber security investments and determine which areas of their organisation need the most attention?
A mature cyber security strategy will bridge all areas of protection and the necessary controls to identify threats, mitigate their impact, and ultimately recover any compromised services.
Traditionally, organisations have focused investments heavily on the preventative, leaning into the concept of keeping threat actors out. Unfortunately, as hybrid working has accelerated in recent years, it has become harder to secure that perimeter and organisations are shifting to ‘zero trust’ to limit the impact of the inevitable breach. Even our most trusted tools can be compromised, so we need to be ready for any eventuality.
Why is it important to be aware of the latest cyber security threats and how to avoid them?
Awareness of latest threats is reactive, and ultimately, we can’t detect or respond to things we haven’t yet seen or understand. We must all accept that the likelihood of being attacked is high and we need to be prepared.
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How should organisations test and validate the effectiveness of their cyber resiliency strategy, and what metrics do you recommend to measure success?
Primarily it is all about understanding your business and the critical components required to continue operating your business and servicing your clients and stakeholders.
Following an attack, restoring data may not be the answer to your problems. The remaining components to rebuild your business service will likely have gaps, so understanding these components is a critical step in building a plan for recovery. The only way to measure the success of your recovery plan is to test it, and really test it to ensure that nothing is missed and the service can be rebuilt.
What advice do you have for organisations that have been hit by a cyber attack?
When hit by an attack, it’s important to take stock of the impact and probability of completely cleansing whatever payload has been delivered. Remember, criminal organisations are working hard to hit a business once, and if possible they will hit a business repeatedly to maximise the return on their initial exploit investment, so securing your assets quickly is important.
Check out our best practice to avoid a cyber security breach
What should organisations do to ensure they have the necessary resources and skills to respond to a cyber attack effectively?
To ensure you have the elements needed to respond successfully, you need to build an effective recovery plan leaning on best practice around protecting your critical assets. Make sure you have the processes and people in place to respond in the event of an attack and build redundancy into these processes to ensure they can be executed in the absence of key participants.
Cyber resilience is not a problem we can solve simply by installing technology. Leveraging the best technology to deliver isolation, immutability, and intelligence in your data protection environment is a great step towards cyber resilience. Taking the time to understand recovery can be the difference between surviving an attack or not.
Take the next steps to cyber resiliency in your organisation
Chat to our cyber security specialists now to find out how strong your current cyber security strategy is against modern threats and how to make it more resilient.
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