Cyber Resilience

Definition of cyber resilience

Cyber resilience is a holistic approach to cybersecurity that emphasizes the ability, preparedness, and adaptability to effectively navigate and recover from cyber threats and incidents.

It encloses a wide variety of strategies, processes, technologies, and cybersecurity practices designed to ensure that an organization can continue functioning, even in the event of a cyberattack or cyber threat.

Why is cybersecurity resilience important?

A cyber incident can disrupt an organization's operations, leading to downtime, financial losses, reputational damage, and potential legal and regulatory consequences.

Cyber resilience plays a vital role in this context, and ensures that an organization can continue its critical functions even during or after an incident, reducing the disruption to business operations.

Benefits of cyber resilience

Given the increasing amount, frequency, and sophistication of cyber attacks, there are a few key reasons, why cyber resilience should be a priority for organizations.

Some of the benefits of cyber resilience include –

• Reduced Downtime
• Financial Loss Mitigation
• Faster Recovery
• Business Continuity
• Less Data Loss

How does cyber resilience work?

Cyber resilience is a holistic approach to cybersecurity, emphasizing the ability to overcome and recover from cyber attacks. It is a preventative measure to counteract human error, software vulnerabilities, hardware issues, and misconfigurations.

The main goal of any cyber resilience strategy is to protect an organization, while also knowing, that there are parts, that will be insecure, no matter how robust a company’s cybersecurity tech stack is.

The challenges of cyber resiliency

Cyber resiliency is the new gold standard when it comes to defending your data and your organization.

In the past, protecting your organization was all about cyber security . But where cyber security software and solutions aim to defend your organization from threats, cyber resiliency is about your ability to adapt to threats, attacks, and other adverse cyber events. Cyber resiliency is broader than broader than cyber security – it's about ensuring availability no matter what difficulties your organization faces, whether it's malicious attacks or weather events that damage critical infrastructure.

The most significant challenge to achieving cyber resiliency is the trend toward cloud computing. If you're exclusively using cloud services like Microsoft Office 365, Salesforce, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Windows Azure, you may be putting all your eggs in one basket in terms of cyber risk. These high-profile cloud service providers are an attractive target for attackers – and a single point of failure for your organization if you don't have a cyber resiliency plan in place.

With the threat landscape taking a dramatic turn into attacks like spear-phishing , impersonation fraud, and ransomware – all email-borne attacks – achieving true cyber resiliency must extend beyond security to include email-related solutions, business continuity, data management, and end-user awareness. That's where Mimecast offers critical capabilities.

Components of a cyber resilience strategy

A cyber resilience strategy should include automated threat protection, recoverability after a successful attacks, adaptability to quickly changing circumstances during both attack attempts and successful attacks, and durability to weather an ever-increasing threat landscape.

How to improve cyber resilience?

A comprehensive cyber resilience strategy should be reviewed periodically as the organization changes and hopefully grows. As new systems are added, they should be factored into your organizations cyber resilience strategy. Be sure to review your cyber resilience strategy periodically for:

• Continuous monitoring and improvement
• Effective incident response planning
• Employee training and awareness
• Proper risk management
• Security measure robustness

Cyber resilience requires strong email management tools

As email-borne threats become more prevalent and sophisticated, many organizations are shifting to a cyber resilience strategy to better protect their business, data and employees.

Cyber resilience is a paradigm shift in cyber security — an acknowledgment that attacks on email systems are likely to continue and despite best efforts, they will sometimes be successful. Consequently, a cyber resilience strategy focuses not just on combating attacks but on ensuring continuity during an attack and fast recovery after a threat is neutralized.

For organizations implementing a cyber resilience plan for email, Mimecast offers an all-in-one suite of solutions to address risks associated to email security, enterprise archiving and email availability.

Cyber resilience with Mimecast

Mimecast provides a cloud-based, fully integrated service designed to support a cyber resilience strategy, while reducing the cost, complexity and risk of managing business email.

Cyber resilience requires solutions to defend against a myriad of threats, to back up and archive data email data for fast recovery, and to provide continuous access to email even when attacks cause servers to go down. To achieve these objectives, many organizations will implement a disjointed variety of point solutions that may be expensive and difficult to manage.

Mimecast's cloud platform and comprehensive services dramatically streamline email management and simplify implementation of a cyber resilience plan.

Comprehensive solutions for cyber resilience

Mimecast services provide tools to support all aspects of a cyber resilience plan, including:

• Email security. Mimecast uses sophisticated, multi-layered detection engines to defend against advanced threats like spear-phishing and whaling, as well as malware, viruses and spam. Mimecast also scans all email for potential data leaks and provides tools that let employees send protected messages and large files easily and securely from their standard mailbox application.
• Email archiving. Mimecast Enterprise Information Archiving provides a highly scalable and resilient archive in the cloud. Users can perform an Outlook email search or restore deleted emails in seconds, thanks to an industry-leading 7-second search SLA. Administrators get automated tools for managing retention, mailboxes, e-discovery and litigation support. Mimecast mail archiving software means that email data is always available before, during and after an attack.
• Email continuity. Mimecast Mailbox Continuity enables email to continue flowing even when email servers are down because of an attack, an outage or planned downtime. With Mimecast, employees can continue to send and receive email and access historic email, attachments and calendar information from any device.

Learn more improving cyber resilience with Mimecast, and about Mimecast's solution for Office 365 backup.