How Cyber Resilience Prepares Your Business for Modern Threats

The key to sustained cybersecurity protection is in cyber resilience and your organization’s ability to prepare for, detect, and recover from modern cyberattacks that can cripple businesses.

What is Cyber Resilience?

According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), cyber resiliency is a measure of an organization’s ability to anticipate, withstand, recover from, and adapt to adverse conditions resulting from cyberattacks.

Related Blog: How to Measure Cybersecurity Risk in a Business

Essentially, it shows you how prepared your business is to continuously operate when things go south. If you’re attacked, programs are compromised, and you’re in full recovery mode, will your business still be able to conduct business and service its customers?

Why Cyber Resilience is Important for Modern Businesses

Now that you understand what cyber resilience is, let’s take a look at how it helps your business be prepared for cyberattacks, save money, and protect your customers and your own reputation.

Mitigating the Risks of a Breach

When businesses get breached by cybercriminals, there are, obviously, a lot of things that can cause major harm. Most people understand that breaches cost money—the average cost was $4.24 million for businesses in 2022—but they don’t know why it costs so much.

The financial costs of a breach stem from larger risks like extended downtime which inhibits your business’ ability to operate (serve customers, fill orders, file paperwork, record data, communicate, etc.), large fines due to non-compliance or data loss, ransom costs if impacted by ransomware, and the associated costs of the technology needed to recover.

Cyber resilience is a business’ ability to quickly and efficiently recover from breaches, the more resilient, the less it will cost.

Building Trust with Your Customers

Additionally, when a breach occurs it instantly becomes a trouble point for your customers who are left wondering if their sensitive information (financial data, payment info, identification, etc.) is safe. This should be seen as an opportunity to prove to your clients and customers that you are prepared, have their best interests at heart, and can protect their privacy in the event of an inevitable attack.

Without established resilience to cyberattacks, you risk burning the bridges between you and your customers permanently and applying devasting harm to your public reputation.

Additionally, it’s important to vet your vendors and third-party partners because 19% of businesses felt reputational harm due to a third-party or associated business being hacked.

Related Checklist: Vendor Cybersecurity to Avoid Third-Party Risks

Competitive Advantages

Cyberattacks affect everybody. You, your competitors, your coworkers, and everyone else. The difference is in how you’re able to react, respond, and recover from the attack. If your business’ cyber resiliency is strong enough to bounce back quicker, that gives you a distinct advantage over your competition.

Having the ability to work through adversity, continue to deliver positive outcomes for customers, and protect and recover your data when others cannot gives you an edge in the eyes of the public and your customers and clients. Additionally, preparation saves you money in recovery efforts and avoids costly downtime that often is dangerous enough to shut companies down for good.

Maintaining Resilience Over Time

One of the most important parts of cyber resiliency is maintaining it over time to stay protected from evolving modern threats, especially during times when you’re successfully able to avoid attacks. Too many businesses don’t get attacked and think they can skirt by with minimal preparation or defenses in place because “it’ll never happen to me” or thinking you can just accept the consequences and move on.

The costs of an attack are too high, both financially and reputationally, to leave it up to chance. Don’t roll the dice on your organization’s future, prepare for the worst and be ready for everything.

Complacency in cybersecurity can result from many things—overconfidence in your established security, reliance on outdated tech or processes, lack of innovation, general apathy toward cybersecurity, or just not understanding the impact of an attack—but the result is always the same: poor security. This is a much more common threat to businesses can most people realize, and this cycle of unpreparedness is hard to break because it’s so much easier to not do anything and think that if attacks don’t come, they never will.

This is, obviously, a very dangerous way of thinking. Bad risk management due to cyber complacency results in harsher attacks that are harder to recover from and which are far more costly.

Stay Ready for the Future

Another benefit of maintaining resiliency over time is being ready for the future of security. Cybersecurity changes fast whether it’s new technology to bolster defenses or a zero-day vulnerability that you need to act fast on, strong resiliency helps you to be ready for the unknowns of the future.

Building Cyber Resilience Today

Part of why so many businesses lack cyber resilience is because it seems so complex and difficult to get started. It’s not, especially when you have the right people at your side. If your business lacks an established IT or cybersecurity team, your best bet is to enlist the help of an experienced third-party, like an MSP, to supplement your team and help you gain the expertise and technology that you need to stay secure.

Learn more about what an MSP can bring to the table and how, with the right help, you can become more cyber resilient and prepare your organization for the uncertain future of modern cybersecurity.