Glossary Terms
What is cyber resilience?
Just as a physical structure must be built to withstand conditions of extreme heat, cold, rain or wind, your business needs to take into account the assailing digital-winds and threat actors that are continuously working to compromise the data of businesses and individuals around the world. Cyber Resilience refers to your ability to withstand and recover from cyber attacks and, in the case of a business, continue delivering the products and services that your customers rely on.
Why is cyber resilience a good idea?
Data is at risk with an increasing trend of companies and private-citizens around the world falling victim to a variety of cyber attacks such as ransomware and phishing. These attacks impact large corporations, small businesses and individuals alike, and result in the compromise of valuable intellectual property, business data, and sensitive customer information. In many cases, a breach may be revealed before there is time to adequately respond, and sometimes before anyone is aware of a compromise. This results in an extremely damaging erosion of customer trust and industry reputation not to mention the on-paper cost of paying a ransom or losing intellectual property. Investing in strategies that prioritize bouncing back in the event of an incident is a good idea. Hence; cyber resilience.
Cyber resilience is a part of using a computer in the 21st century.
Improving your cyber resilience is a necessity. While physical security is still important, your data is much more likely to be stolen due to an unprotected endpoint rather than an unlocked door. It is no longer a question of if you will ever need to contend with cyber threats, but instead is a question of when you will do so and which threats will land. When your hardware goes down, how will you recover? When an employee (or child) clicks something they shouldn’t, how will you respond? Taking proactive steps to answer these questions is how you begin raising your cyber resilience.
To interact or transact business online you need to be able to safeguard your data and recover from digital threats and setbacks.
Cyber resilience is primarily about recovery.
You will never prevent every attack from succeeding. While hardening your security practices is important and can prevent or proactively mitigate many threats, there is still only so much you can do to prevent a cyber attack or a major hardware failure. Security is an arms race, and even the most state-of-the-art hardware or most stringent policies aren’t impenetrable.
Because <insert_expletive_here> will hit the fan, you need a plan for how you will respond when it does and how you will recover your data.
The best way to build additional resiliency into your program is to assume that every proactive measure you take will eventually fail. From there you can architect a solution that provides the second layer of resiliency.
Redundant systems and regular data backups blunt the effects of even the most disastrous setbacks. When you can recover your data and get your systems back up and running after sustaining a digital catastrophe, you have exhibited cyber resilience. You may wobble, but you’ll never fall down.
A backup strategy will give your business an edge in cyber resilience.
Implementing a strong backup strategy with an offsite offsite and local storage solutions for redundancy, makes you more resilient. This alone is an enormous step that will entail some upfront expense but will more than pay for itself, and can save your entire business (or digital life). With the right backup strategy, you can weather many of the biggest threats to critical data like systems failures and ransomware all while, limiting downtime and allowing you to continue onward.
Cyber resilience strategies keep your business competitive. They keep your personal data safe. And most importantly, they mean you can tell would-be hackers to go fly a kite.
Related Glossaries
CrashPlan® provides peace of mind through secure, scalable, and straightforward endpoint data backup. We help organizations recover from any worst-case scenario, whether it is a disaster, simple human error, a stolen laptop, ransomware or an as-of-yet undiscovered calamity.
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