Beginner's Guide: How to Build a Cyber Resilience Strategy for Your Business

Cybercrime is more dynamic, volatile, and damaging than ever. Ransomware attacks, for example, continue to wreak havoc across businesses of all sizes and industries. Recent statistics are bleak: 

• One industry tracking agency reported more than 2,500 attacks in the first half of 2024. That averages out to about 14 publicly claimed attacks per day. 

• In another study, only 13% of attacked organizations were able to recover their data without paying a ransom. 

• Even worse, 24% of those attacked organizations that paid the ransom still weren’t able to recover their data.

Guarding your organization requires not only the most up-to-date cyber security solutions, but also a robust cyber resilience strategy to minimize disruptions, maintain operations, and quickly recover assets during and after an attack. In this article, you’ll learn about: 

• The difference between cyber security and cyber resiliency 

• How to build a basic cyber resilience strategy 

• Enhancing your strategy with advanced techniques 

• Legal and compliance issues 

• Ensuring your strategy is effective 

• How Wasabi can help strengthen your resiliency 

Cyber security and cyber resiliency differences

While the terms are often used interchangeably, cyber security and cyber resilience are actually two components that work together to form a single vital security strategy.  

Cyber security includes all of the technologies, software, hardware, policies, and practices you leverage to keep your organization’s data, applications, and infrastructure secure. Cyber security spans on-premises environments to private and public cloud platforms and even out to edge devices. 

Cyber resilience, on the other hand, is the way your organization prepares for, responds to, and recovers from attacks when they occur. It’s a comprehensive plan that springs into action as soon as an attack or data loss is detected, and it defines how quickly and efficiently you get operations back up and running—and recover critical data and applications—to maintain business continuity. 

Securing all of your data and applications and developing a cyber resilience strategy can be a challenging task, but many organizations are able to simplify the process in the cloud. That’s because cloud service providers handle some of that security and resilience workload, which is one of the top benefits of cloud security. 

To get an in-depth comparison of these two terms, read our guide, Cyber Resilience vs. Cyber Security.

How to build basic cyber resilience

Before developing a solid cyber resilience strategy, you’ll need to do a little preparation. This pre-work includes:

Identifying critical assets and data

Stakeholders across the organization should work with IT to identify all of the most essential digital assets, data, applications, systems, and processes based on criticality, sensitivity and other criteria. This thorough assessment of your organization will require determining where data and other assets are located, how users access them, and who is responsible for them. 

Assessing current cyber security measures and risks

With your existing cyber security applications and policies in mind, determine which assets or data sets are at greatest risk of threats or vulnerabilities that could affect their availability, integrity, or confidentiality. Also consider the potential impact to your business if these assets or data sets are attacked or lost. How severely will it affect your business? Will it cause excessive downtime or damage to the customer’s experience? Answering questions like these can be helpful.

Getting familiar with common cyber threats

It’s tough to protect against attacks you don’t even know about. That’s why it’s smart to get familiar with the most common cyber threats to your data and applications and stay abreast of the always-evolving landscape. Regularly consulting online sources or publications focused on security can help you do this. You can also get updates on current threats from the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

Six steps to build a cyber resilience strategy

Now, with foundational knowledge established about your specific data and assets, risk levels, potential vulnerabilities, and the most common threats and attacks, it’s time to begin building your cyber resilience strategy.

Step 1: Establish a cross-functional cyber resilience team

The first step in building a cyber resilience strategy is to establish a cyber resilience team. The team should include members from across your organization, such as people in IT, legal, HR, communications, operations, and security. Assign roles to each member based on their areas of expertise and experience. It’s also important to determine security team goals up front and identify how you plan to hit those targets. Many organizations develop a governance framework that defines how decisions will be made and who is accountable for what. Also, determine how often you’ll meet and keep records of each meeting.

Step 2: Develop and implement strong cyber resilience policies

This step is where all the up-front planning pays off. The cyber resilience team develops and implements the specific cyber resilience policies for the organization, such as:

• Data protection and privacy

• Compliance with regulations such as HIPAA or GDPR

• Stringent access control

• How user access is monitored and managed

• Acceptable use, including device usage, internet browsing guidelines, and prohibited activities

• Business continuity and disaster recovery

• Vendor risk management to reduce potential vulnerabilities

• Change management, including approval processes and risk assessments

All of these policies should be specifically tailored to the organization’s unique needs, regulatory obligations, and infrastructure.

Step 3: Create an incident response plan (IRP)

An IRP is a critical component of any cyber resilience strategy. It’s the blueprint for how your organization will react and respond to a cyber attack or other type of data loss. The better and more detailed the IRP, the more efficient recovery can be. Here’s how many organizations complete an IRP: 

1. Outline the IRP’s goals and clearly specify the types of incidents it will address, whether it be a data breach, DDoS attack, malicious insider attack, malware, ransomware, or all of these. 

2. Create an incident response team and assign roles, which typically include a leader, advisors, technical experts, and communication experts. 

3. Rank incident types in different levels of severity based on the negative impact of the incident (high, medium, low). Create response strategies for each level. 

4. Discuss and define response procedures. These include how an attack is detected and analyzed, how the breach is contained and mitigated, and how recovery will proceed. 

5. Establish a plan for communication during and after the incident. Who will be notified immediately? Who is notified later, and how? Who will alert vendors, regulatory bodies, customers, other employees, and when? 

6. Determine the level of documentation and reporting that will need to be completed during and after an incident. These can include detailed records of incident activities, timelines of the occurrence, actions taken, and so on. Establish who will be responsible for documentation and reporting. 

Step 4: Prioritize regular cyber security training for employees

It’s essential to make your cyber resilience strategies the most successful they can be by getting every employee involved in training. As much as possible, create a culture of security and resilience awareness. In this way, everyone at the organization can take an active part in ensuring internal policies are observed. They can also be active participants in protection by being aware of the most common traps used by attackers, such as phishing emails, social engineering, and so on.

Step 5: Implement robust data backup and recovery systems

Data backup and recovery systems should be a top priority for a successful cyber resilience strategy. Using your pre-planning security information about which data is most critical to your organization and how you’ve classified all your other data, you can define backup objectives for each level of data. There are two main objectives when it comes to data backup:

• Recovery point objective (RPO) —RPO is the amount of data loss you are willing to experience, based on time. For instance, you might say the loss of one day of a specific data set would be all right, whereas for the most critical data, maybe even an hour’s loss would be devastating. The shorter the RPO, the more frequent you will need to back up that data.

• Recovery time objective (RTO) — RTO is the amount of time in which specific services and operations must be restored after an incident. For instance, your most critical data and applications must be restored within three hours of an attack, or business could be significantly impacted. Other IT systems or applications won’t be as critical as those and could be brought back online by the next day or even week without serious impact. With RTO, the shorter the time frame, the more investment and resources will be required to make that rapid recovery possible.

Based on your determined RPOs and RTOs, you’ll be able to set backup schedules and strategies—such as full or incremental backups—and even decide which backup storage solutions work best for different data sets and applications. Then, you can develop your data recovery plans and determine who will be responsible for recovering which systems and data as needed.

Step 6: Continuously monitor and improve security measures

The last step in building an effective cyber resilience strategy is to maintain ongoing monitoring and testing of all of your security policies and plans. Many organizations even set up realistic attack drills and go through the full attack mitigation and data recovery process to make sure everyone knows what to do and that there are no gaps in the process that could mess up the plan. Other ways to monitor the strategy can include scheduled reviews, vulnerability assessments, penetration testing, compliance audits, and even things like phishing testing for employees across the organization.

The results of your testing will let you know if the strategy needs to be revised or improved. Any cyber resilience strategy should be considered flexible and changeable as threats evolve, needs change, and technologies mature.

Enhancing your strategy with advanced techniques

One way to enhance your cyber resilience strategy is to make use of the many data protection technologies and tools that come with cloud storage. These include:

• S3 Object Lock with immutable backups — Object Lock keeps data secure within cloud object storage. It enables immutable backups, which are copies of your data that cannot be altered or erased by anyone, even the cloud service provider. Immutable data backups with object lock can give you peace of mind and allow quick, efficient recovery of even the most critical data when you need it.

• Object replication — With object replication, you can make multiple copies of your data and store them in different buckets or different geographical regions. This redundancy provides extra assurance that you’ll be able to access or recover your data after an attack or outage.

• Multi-user authentication — This extra level of access security control provides powerful protection against both external and internal threats and bad actors. With multi-user authentication, you can designate up to three users who must all agree before a specific account or data set can be deleted. This control is revolutionary when it comes to the world of cloud account security. Wasabi is the only cloud storage provider to offer this security feature.

Legal and compliance issues

When developing your cyber resilience strategy, it’s important to make sure the team understands what it takes to stay compliant with global cyber security and data privacy standards. These regulations will often inform your decisions on where and how to store sensitive data and backups, and how and when they can be accessed. 

For instance, the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) is a regulation developed by the European Union in 2022 to ensure that digital products and services stay secure and protected. It mandates the security efforts of businesses across all industries, from transparency in cyber security practices, risk assessment and management, incident reporting, enforcement and compliance, and supply chain security. 

Most regulations around data security, data privacy, and data sovereignty are meant to guide organizations in their efforts to protect their customers, their business, and their critical infrastructure. 

Measuring the success of your strategy

Organizations use key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure their success or effectiveness of a specific initiative or strategy. When it comes to cyber resilience, many organizations look at metrics that often include incident response time, number of incidents detected, time to detection, backup success rate, simulation and testing results, how many systems are compliant with security policies, user awareness training scores, and risk assessment scores by third-party specialists. 

Regular cyber resilience audits can also give you a good idea of how effective your strategies and practices are in real-life scenarios and provide recommendations about how to improve anything that isn’t working optimally. Knowing where and how you can improve your strategy is important to keep it as effective as possible and ready for action when the time comes. 

Auditors will typically assess risks, review processes and policies, evaluate technical tools and applications, assess effectiveness of security awareness and training among employees, and review incident response procedures and capabilities. Through regular security audits, you can identify weaknesses, strengthen your strategy and plans, monitor compliance with regulations, and improve overall cyber resilience across the organization. 

Discover how Wasabi can strengthen your resiliency

Wasabi understands the importance of being cyber resilient and we have a number of solutions for protecting your data in the cloud. Wasabi delivers S3-compatible, secure cloud that costs up to 80% lower than the major hyperscalers and never charges for egress or application programming interface (API) requests. That means you can test and restore backups as often as you like—without incurring unpredictable fees. Regular security audits are a crucial safeguard against malware and support for maintaining resiliency.

Contact us today to learn more about making cyber resilience a priority for your organization.