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Make Cyber Resilience a Part of Your Organization’s DNA
With more advanced threats continuously evolving in a post-pandemic remote workplace, Vanguard Integrity Professionals has developed a cyber resilience solution to help organizations implement new strategies to protect their enterprise security systems from more sophisticated threats.
Cyber resilience is a framework of measures and capabilities designed to protect the mainframe infrastructure from cyber threats and attacks. It involves implementing security protocols, technologies and practices that safeguard the mainframe’s critical data, applications and infrastructure from unauthorized access, data breaches and other malicious activities.
By ensuring robust cyber resilience, organizations can maintain the integrity, confidentiality and availability of their mainframe systems, safeguarding their valuable resources and operations.
A cyber-resilient approach requires more than just the right technologies. It also addresses the people, processes, supply chain security, and risk management practices.
Cybersecurity mainly focuses on protecting business information while cyber resilience solutions protect the business from attacks that can potentially disrupt the entire operation. Cyber resilience is a more integrated and proactive approach that includes cybersecurity as a key element.
With nearly a million employees suddenly required to work remotely in the wake of COVID-19, CISOs were tasked with creating a secure remote work environment to ensure business continuity. CISOs had to grapple with data security, application security and endpoint security in an unprecedented context. The lessons learned in this hyper-accelerated transition to remote work created a radical shift to traditional security governance and cyber-resilience efforts.
1.
Identify
2.
Protect
3.
Detect
4.
Respond
5.
Recover
Build and restore confidence and reputation.
Quickly identify the main cause of issues to minimize any further impact.
Improve and manage the issues through a repeatable and scalable remediation process.
Increase the transparency of the issues and the corrective actions for senior management, compliance and regulators through regular reporting.
Patch management policies deliver peace of mind to IT stakeholders and decision-makers. If properly followed, these policies will ensure business software and underlying infrastructure to be free of bugs and vulnerabilities, as well as deliver the most value possible to the enterprise.
Privileged users are an organization’s biggest vulnerability.
Establishing an automated process to monitor privileged user access activity on your systems that will generate user reports is the best way to protect from insider threats is to establish.
These eight steps are among the most important to developing an effective cybersecurity awareness culture for your organization.
Build and restore confidence and reputation.
Build a culture of enhanced security compliance policies
Implement cybersecurity awareness and training (every four to six months)
Create and enforce a “strong password” policy
Ensure procedures are followed correctly
Keep defensive practices updated
Have policies in place to keep sensitive data safe
Prohibit the use of unauthorized software
Organizations should perform regular security assessments to quickly identify and prioritize mainframe penetration risks.
The benefits of security assessments include:
Prevent security breaches and other risks
Protect critical customer and corporate data and applications
Reduce risk by implementing security policies and procedures
Increase efficiencies in managing and auditing mainframe systems
Enhance productivity, decrease downtime and align security resources
Conducting periodical penetration testing can detect weaknesses and vulnerabilities within a system prior to an internal or external attack. In addition, a pen test can determine if sufficient defenses are in place, offer remediation guidance and recommend a plan for ongoing testing.
Identifies exploitations of systems and services on the network layer and applications running in the environment
Provides comprehensive reports with details of penetration vulnerabilities, severity rankings, remediation instructions and plans for ongoing testing
Ensures that compliance and procedures meet industry and regulatory standards
1.
Preparation
2.
Identification
3.
Containment
4.
Eradication
5.
Recovery
6.
Lessons Learned
The average data breach cost in 2022 was $9.44 million dollars in the U.S. Investing in a cyber resilience strategy will minimize the financial impact of cyber incidents and enable your organization to operate more efficiently and securely. The costs would vary depending on the size of an organization. In 2022 organizations typically spent at least 10% of their annual budget on cybersecurity.
This can and will depend on the urgency of the CISO to urge the organization’s management team to make a committed decision with a timeframe to have the strategy components in place.
Reduces downtime
Builds a strong reputation
Enhances security
Improves regulatory compliance
Saves money
Cyber insurance is an increasingly important aspect of risk management for many organizations. The role of cyber insurance has skyrocketed since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, correlating with an increase in ransomware and more sophisticated cyberattacks. The global cyber insurance market is expected to jump more than $20 billion by 2025.
Having a solid cyber resilience plan in place will reduce the overall risk and impact of an operational outage recovery timeframe from several weeks to just hours or days. Cyber insurance can pay for the costs of that recovery and any lost revenue. It’s likely that having cyber resilience implemented into your organization’s day-to-day operations will be a prerequisite for getting insurance.
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Sponsored by Vanguard Integrity Professionals