Glossary / Cyber resilience

Cyber resilience

The concept of cyber resilience is about an organization’s ability to prepare for, respond to, and recover from cyber attacks or other disruptions affecting its digital infrastructure and environment. Cyber resilience is different from general cybersecurity, which is more about protecting systems and data. 

What is cyber resilience?

Cyber resilience encompasses a broader strategy: it ensures that, even in the face of a successful attack or system failure, critical functions continue and business operations can recover quickly with minimal impact.One misconception about cyber resilience is that its key goal is preventing breaches; rather, it’s about mitigating the impact when a breach does happen. Think of it like building a digital walls to keep attackers out as well as a safety net to help you if an attack succeeds. 

Ultimately, it’s a holistic approach that integrates cybersecurity, business continuity, and organizational resilience.

What does a resilient organization look like? It has well-defined incident response plans, backup procedures, and disaster recovery protocols that allow it to adapt and maintain operations in times of crisis. Any disruption — whether from a cyberattack, hardware failure, or natural disaster — should not lead to catastrophic losses or long-term downtime.

Key components of cyber resilience

Cyber resilience consists of many components, each contributing to an organization’s ability to withstand, respond to, and recover from disruptions. Here are the key components to be aware of that help create a comprehensive approach to handling such an unpredictable (and increasingly challenging) threat landscape. 

Risk management: Identifying potential risks and vulnerabilities (pen tests and vulnerability scans are two examples) and developing strategies to reduce their likelihood or impact.

Incident response: A clear and detailed action plan for detecting, responding to, and mitigating incidents quickly to reduce damage.

Disaster recovery and business continuity: Procedures for restoring critical systems and resuming business operations with minimal interruption.

Employee awareness and training: Ensuring staff are informed about best practices in cybersecurity and are prepared to recognize and respond to threats. Training should be frequent, engaging and empowering. 

Redundancy and backup: Regular (and easy to restore) data backups and redundant systems help recover operations quickly if primary systems fail or are unavailable.

Why is cyber resilience important?

As cyber threats and the techniques, tactics and procedures (TTPs) used by cybercriminals  grow increasingly sophisticated, it’s practically impossible to guarantee complete immunity from attacks. Cyber resilience helps organizations maintain trust and confidence by minimizing the impact of disruptions. 

For the enterprise, being resilient means protecting not just data and systems but also brand reputation, customer relationships, and regulatory compliance.

This means that with a good cyber resilience strategy, companies can ‘bounce back’ quickly, maintain customer service, and reduce financial and reputational damage. In highly regulated industries, such as healthcare, finance, oil and gas, resilience also plays an especially critical role in meeting compliance standards.

Best practices for building cyber resilience

To effectively build up cyber resilience, organizations must implement best practices that focus on preparation, response, and recovery. By adopting these practices, companies can strengthen their ability to defend against cyber threats and minimize the impact of disruptions.

Develop and test incident response plans: Run regular drills to make sure your incident response plan is up to date and that your team knows how to act quickly in case of an attack.

Implement zero trust architecture: Assume that all network activity could be malicious and verify everything before granting access. Key to this is the Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP). 

Invest in backup solutions: Regularly back up data and store it in multiple secure locations so it can be recovered quickly. 

Monitor continuously: Implement continuous monitoring to quickly detect unusual behavior and mitigate threats.

Whether facing a cyberattack, system failure, or another type of crisis, being cyber resilient means staying strong, adaptable, and operational under pressure. 

Learn about how Identity Continuity provides resilience when access to your primary IDP is interrupted.