Cyber Security Resilience

What is cyber resilience?

Cyber resilience is your ability to prepare for, respond to, and recover from cyber attacks and data breaches while continuing to operate effectively. An organisation is cyber resilient when they can defend against cyber attacks, have adequate cyber security risk management, and can achieve business continuity during and after cyber incidents.

Cyber resilience, alongside attack surface minimisation, has emerged over the past few years because single layer security controls are no longer enough to mitigate todays cyber risks. A multi-layered cyber security defence is essential to protect businesses from becoming victims of cyber crime.

Why is it important?

Ever experienced a major IT incident, where systems access or network access was lost? Where customer, supplier and internal data was lost or corrupted? Where operations were severely disrupted and clients expressing their discontent over service disruption?

When the pandemic struck, businesses swiftly turned to IT keep the wheels on. Ingenuity, agility and adaptability alongside an expanding use of cloud services and remote working technologies kept business going. Many of the these new hybrid working practices have been sustained and increased our operational reliance on technology. Needless to say we have never been so dependent, so how would you manage if it was severely disrupted and difficult to respond to and recover from? Many businesses never recover and go out of business within six months.

Why multi-layered ?

The simple answer is that a determined cyber criminal, with the right tools and skills, will get through your perimeter defences. The tools they use do not discriminate companies based on size or market prominence. Attacks can easily evade signature based AV, firewalls and increasingly leverage sophisticated social engineering techniques. The advanced hacking tools once the preserve of State Actors are also now being made available to the criminal masses.

Enterprise wide

Effective cyber resilience must be an enterprise-wide risk-based strategy, a collaborative approach driven from executives to everyone in the organisation, partners, supply chain participants and customers. It must proactively manage risks, threats, vulnerabilities and the effects on critical information and supporting assets.

Social engineering is also a key tool in the cyber criminals arsenal, so having a company-wide awareness of their exploit tactics is critical. In our experience, this awareness is often lacking and a major vulnerability in the companies cyber security defence and ripe for attackers to exploit. By leveraging high quality training materials this lack of awareness can easily be addressed and radically reduce business exposure to this type of exploit.

Mitigating cyber risks

Cyber security resilience is all about mitigating risk such that business impact can be minimised and operations maintained. Cyber security risk is determined by determining the probability and impact of cyber threats exploiting a cyber security vulnerability, even where these vulnerabilities reside in cyber security controls.

The aim of cyber security frameworks, such as Cyber Essentials is to minimise these risks through the implementation of effective controls. The framework also defines the standard that these controls must meet in order to mitigate approximately 80% of cyber attacks. The problem is far too many businesses are not aware of this standard, let alone know how to achieve it. In addition, a vast, complex and an opaque cyber security ecosystem, disparate and costly point technologies, steep learning curves and expensive in-house cyber security team resource requirements, have combined to make resilient cyber security unobtainable.

Award winning approach

Our approach to making resilient cyber security achievable for companies of all sizes is based on an award winning approach that radically transformed service adoption for a global engineering client. Fundamental to this approach is a deep understanding of the root cause barriers to service adoption:

Clients do not want the burden of implementing and maintaining resilient cyber security, including steep learning curves, complicated procurement and integration across multiple vendors. A rapidly shifting threat landscape, increasing attack surface and the effort, commitment and funding needed to keep identification, protection, detection, resolution and recovery services up to date and effective.
The cost is too high for many budgets, including the need to maintain expensive in-house cyber security teams. Without dedicated support, few SME's have the internal resources for this to work. Its specialised, complex, constantly moving and increasingly an existential threat.
Cyber security is too complex for small businesses and the cyber security ecosystem is extremely difficult to navigate.
Cyber security tools and solutions must be affordable, easy to use, install, low maintenance, address security requirements and be adaptable.
Cyber security is not a priority, staying in business and creating profits trumps it every time .
The perceived risk of a major cyber security incident doesn't warrant the investment.

This is not an exhaustive list of barriers, but will resonate with many UK businesses, especially SMEs.

Cyber Security 360

Based on decades of our teams experience in top-tier IT consulting, we've learned how to cut through complexity, the noise and deliberately vague product descriptions and engineer world class solutions. Our clients appreciate our encapsulation of complexity, deep understanding of their requirements and ability to stay on brief. Simplicity, delivery excellence, honesty, credibility and exceeding clients expectations are essential to building relationships, trust and collaboration.

Cyber security 360 is a new and innovative cyber security service designed to overcome business barriers to adopting resilient cyber security.

Cyber SECURITY 360