The 4 Lenses of Resilience and What They Mean for Security

We’ve been talking a lot about security resilience recently, and for good reason. It’s clear the only way businesses can operate in today’s hybrid world is by taking bold steps to increase visibility, awareness, and integration across their systems. All while maintaining a singular goal of becoming more resilient in the face of evolving threats. But that doesn’t just mean expanding the scope of your security stack. It also means examining the resilience of other pillars of your business, like operations, organizational structure, financial processes, and supply chain functions.

What is Financial Resilience?

If threats do compromise your business, time is of the essence when it comes to detection, response, and recovery. The longer an organization is unable to operate normally, the more at risk it becomes for damaging financial losses. As Diana Kelley, CSO and CISO at Cybrize notes, “it’s not about giving up, it’s about being better prepared.” Financial and security resilience go together, you can’t have one without the other and both are incredibly important for businesses of all sizes.

What is Operational Resilience?

While recovering from an attack is important for maintaining resilience, a key feature of strong operational resilience is a business’s ability to operate through adverse conditions, not just recover well after the fact. Trina Ford, SVP and CISO at AEG, notes the importance of “preparedness so that your business can continue to thrive” while your security team addresses threats.

It also relies heavily upon strong staffing models because people are a critical part of any business’s day-to-day operations. What happens when someone is out sick, or is unable to access the necessary tools to do their job? Operational resilience means having a plan in place to be prepared for these situations.

In this video, CISOs and other security professionals explain what operational resilience means to them and why it’s a necessary component of overall security resilience:

What is Supply Chain Resilience?

If the past few years have taught us anything, it’s that supply chains are fragile. But there are ways to prepare for disruption, such as minimizing negative outcomes like production delays, infrastructure weaknesses, and increasingly complex logistics. When it comes to security resilience, supply chains are important because they expand the attack surface to any third party in your network. Oftentimes, this is where businesses have the lowest visibility, making it hard to detect and respond to threats. Supply chain resilience means preparing for these challenges before they cause real damage and having contingency plans in place. 

What is Organizational Resilience?

According to Helen Patton, CISO of the SBG, “security is a risk business”. We couldn’t agree more. In the context of organizational resilience, this means dedicating resources to the areas of the business that are creating the most value and protecting those to minimize the risk of damage from potential threats.

With hybrid work here to stay, the threat landscape is expanding quickly, and security teams are working constantly to stay up to date on the latest attacks. But defending against everything all the time is impossible, so it’s necessary to make informed decisions about how to dedicate resources efficiently. The goal is to maximize flexibility and agility to enable security teams to act confidently when, not if, a threat lands.

Avoiding cyberattacks 100% of the time is impossible, but by ensuring the integrity of each part of your business, you can address threats confidently and emerge stronger. Investing in security resilience will strengthen your business in each of these areas, and help you better prepare for the challenges ahead.

Learn more about how Cisco Secure can help you at any step of the journey.

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