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Hardening Your Enterprise Compliance

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.

What is Cyber Resilience? 

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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. 

Cyber resiliency

is the last line of defense

against global attacks!

How is cyber resilience different from cybersecurity solutions?

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.

The Effect of COVID-19 on Cybersecurity 

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.

What steps and solutions should be included in my plan?

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Develop and implement a security baseline

1.
Identify

2.
Protect

3.
Detect

4.
Respond

5.
Recover

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Measurable remediation plans

 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. 

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Implement patch control policies and software 

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.

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Continuous monitoring programs/privileged access monitoring (PAM) 

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.

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Employee awareness and training

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

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Full security assessments 

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

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Regular penetration testing

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. 

 
Other benefits include: 

 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

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Incident response plan 

A cyber incident response plan outlines what an organization should do in the event of a data breach or other form of security incident.
 
A cyber incident response includes six phases:

1.

Preparation 

2.

Identification

3.
Containment

4.

Eradication

5.
Recovery 

6.
Lessons Learned

How much will a cyber resilient framework cost an organization?

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. 

How long will it take?

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.

What are the benefits of a cyber resilience strategy? 

Reduces downtime 

Builds a strong reputation

Enhances security 

Improves regulatory compliance 

Saves money 

Will it help lower the premiums on our cyber insurance? 

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.