Cybersecurity and cyber resilience — what’s the difference?

While both terms have become quite common in the industry and used as buzzwords to sound all fancy, the truth is, most professionals do not understand the important difference between the two.

This can be extremely problematic and can result in devastating outcomes in the aftermath of a data breach. What’s important to understand is that there’s a major distinction between cybersecurity and cyber resilience.

Keeping this in mind, in today’s article, I will try and explain how cyber resilience compares to cybersecurity and also share with you some strategies to implement a proper cybersecurity / cyber resilience program.  You can also check out Rhinonetworks.com for their advanced security license.

What Is The Difference Between Cybersecurity and Cyber Resilience?

To help explain both terms in the easiest way possible, let me paint a picture for you.

Cybersecurity

As you probably know, cybersecurity refers to protecting computer systems and networks from theft, disruptions, damage, or modification.

But this sounds quite boring, doesn’t it? To make things interesting, let me give you a real-world example. Okay — so you probably might have heard or used a VPN service at least once. If you don’t know what a VPN does, it basically creates a wall between you and the rest of the world.

Doing so will prevent hackers or malicious entities from intercepting or modifying the data packets sent and received over your network.

Here, using a VPN can be considered as part of your broader cybersecurity strategy. For instance, a lot of small businesses enforce their employees to use VPNs like ExpressVPN, which is considered to be a reliable cybersecurity solution. Speaking of which, if you wish to try it out for yourself, do check out its free trial.

To further clarify, cybersecurity is a series of standard procedures implemented to prevent hackers from compromising your IT systems.

But, even if your cybersecurity strategy is on par with industry standards, there will always be room for error. With constantly changing threat landscapes, there’s always a chance that a hacker might find some loophole that could be exploited.

Cyber Resilience

Cyber resilience, on the other hand, determines how well anyone can continue their operations in a post-cyber-attack situation.

Ideally, with a proper cyber resilience strategy, an entity should be able to carry out its day to day operations as normal regardless of a cyberattack or cyber-disruptions.

What makes cyber resilience so important is its ability to maintain operations during mission-critical events. Cyber resilience, therefore, focuses on constantly analyzing threats, risk, and developing continuity planning to restore operations after a breach.

To sum up, cybersecurity focuses on protection, and cyber-resilience focuses on developing strategies to thrive when cybersecurity fails due to some reason or the other.

Why Cyber Resilience Matters?

So I think I’ve made it clear that cybersecurity and cyber resilience are codependent. Without cyber resilience, in case of a severe cyberattack, your entire business operations may come to a complete halt. Cybersecurity itself is only good for prevention and cannot help you recover from an attack.

Therefore, when cybersecurity fails, cyber resilience is responsible to bring operations back to normal.

While it’s simple to assume that your cybersecurity strategies are foolproof, it’s better to stay realistic, accept that the worst may come when you’re least expecting, and develop resilience strategies to tackle unforeseen calamities.

This is exactly why cyber resilience is considered a major part of any organization’s risk management strategy.

Strategies to Implement a Proper Cybersecurity / Cyber Resilience Program

Your cyber resilience program will determine how you or your organization will recover from a potential cyberattack. Therefore, you’ll need to develop robust strategies.

Here’s how you can strategize your cyber resilience program at the very least:

1. Keep website protected

Site protection is an integral part of a cybersecurity and to protect the site you need an SSL certificate. Coming to SSL certificate you can go with cheap wildcard SSL or multi domain wildcard. The reason to go with such certificates is their ability to cover unlimited subdomains even if they are multi level subdomains. It is a cost effective way to secure your website. You can choose other types of SSL certificates as per your website’s structure. Making your website secure is required in modern days to fight against data theft.

2.  Create backup regularly

Without a proper cyber resilience strategy in place, if your business gets targeted by hackers, your valuable data, which is critical to your business might get abolished by hackers unless you pay up a certain amount of ransom.

But if periodic backups are maintained, you can simply restore any hijacked data and resume your business operations as if nothing ever happened.

3. Communicate the Importance of Cyber Resilience & Cyber Security

Since the cyber threat landscape is constantly evolving, it is absolutely crucial to communicate the importance of cybersecurity and cyber resilience with stakeholders and employees. Conducting monthly seminars and workshops can help your team effectively recover from a post cyberattack scenario.

4. Test Run Cyber Attacks

Similar to running fire drills to prepare individuals to cope up with a disastrous situation, it is super important to simulate cyberattacks to test how your organization will react in case of an actual breach. Running controlled attacks periodically will prepare individuals to promptly go through standard procedures to minimize threats.

Wrapping Up!

While cybersecurity is considered to be the first line of defense against cyberattacks, it is important to understand that cybersecurity is nothing without cyber resilience.

Because at the end of the day, if you can’t recover from a cyberattack, then what good will come out of painstakingly implementing industry-standard cybersecurity tools.

So to wrap up, cybersecurity and cyber resilience are codependent. If implemented together, then only you can greatly minimize the damages caused by a cyberattack.

In the realm of cyber fortification, the salience of adaptive authentication, coupled with Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)  cannot be overstated. These tools magnify the robustness of digital defence mechanisms through the application of variegated validation techniques and the tailoring of the authentication journey to align with the risk quotient inherent in a particular user interaction or transactional event.

Shifting our gaze, Just-In-Time (JIT) privilege access coalesces with the doctrine of minimal privilege to form the bedrock of a formidable cybersecurity stance. JIT access is a strategic measure that provisionally endows privileged accounts with the requisite permissions, contingent on necessity and temporality. This judicious regulation curtails opportunities for privilege misappropriation and malevolent exploitation.

The principle of least privilege, a paradigm advocating for the allocation of only the most essential permissions to users for task completion, instates a further barricade against potential harm. In the event of an account compromise or an insider malefactor, the doctrine mitigates the extent of possible damage, thereby fortifying the overall security landscape.