A cyber resilience plan is an essential piece of your organization’s overall risk management program. It documents the steps you will take to protect your organization from and respond to a cyber incident. In this guide, we will walk you through the process of creating a cyber resilience plan for your business. We’ll provide tips on what to include in your plan, as well as resources to help you get started.
First, let’s define cyber resilience. Cyber resilience is the ability of an organization to protect, detect, and respond to cyber threats. It is a combination of people, processes, and technology that work together to reduce the impact of a cyber incident. A cyber resilience plan should be tailored to your organization’s specific needs and risks.
Now that we’ve defined cyber resilience, let’s talk about the four primary steps involved in drafting your organization’s cyber resilience plan.
Step 1: Understanding Your Resources and Capabilities
The first step in creating a cyber resilience plan is to understand your organization’s resources and capabilities. This includes understanding your people, processes, and technology. You need to know what you have, what it can do, and how it can be used to protect your organization from a cyber incident. This step will help you identify gaps in your resources and capabilities, which you can address in subsequent steps.
Step 2: Defining Your Risk Posture
The second step in creating a cyber resilience plan is to define your organization’s risk posture. This will help you identify which assets are most critical to your business and need the most protection. It will also help you prioritize the steps you need to take to reduce the impact of a cyber incident.
Step 3: Understand that Data is Currency
Treating your data like currency will help put you in the right frame of mind. That is, data should be valued, protected, and used wisely. This means understanding what data you have, where it is stored, who has access to it, and how it is used. It also means encrypting sensitive data and implementing security controls to prevent unauthorized access.
Step 4: Get Ready to Change
Making all of the above work will require action. Ask yourself the following:
- Am I willing to change?
- Can I do better than “just good enough?”
- Can I truly make the changes required?
IBM’s 2020 Cyber Resilience Report says you should do the following:
- Implement an enterprise-wide cybersecurity incident response plan to minimize business disruption
- Tailor response plans to specific attacks in your industry
- Embrace interoperability to increase visibility and reduce complexity
- Invest in technologies to accelerate incident response
- Align your security and privacy teams
- Formalize C-level/board reporting to raise the visibility of the organization’s cyber resilience
Are you ready to get a cyber resilience plan in place for your organization? If so, simply enter your name and email address in the form below and you’ll be on your way to making your organization safer and more cyber resilient!
