Resilience: the key to surviving life and cyberspace

When you hear the word “resilience”, you may not think of survival first, but it is key for surviving the physical and digital worlds.

Resilience is human. (Source: Getty Images)

So, what exactly is resilience?

According to Merriam Webster, ‘resilience’ is defined as “an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change”. Without resilience, we simply cannot live. People endure poverty and hunger; towns recover after a major disaster; even babies must leave the comfort and security of the womb to grow and survive. All of these things require resilience to be possible.

Making the transition to the outside world is a big change. (Source: Getty Images)

How does this apply to the real and digital worlds?

Resilience is applicable in both the physical and digital worlds. In the physical realm, we strive to protect ourselves and those we care about from various threats including crime, warfare, disease, and hunger.

In the digital realm, we try to keep our personal data, identities and systems — cell phones, computers and other internet-connected objects — secure from threats. Over time, these threats can become more complex and grow in volume. We must be able to adapt and be ready to respond to them.

Having a plan, and practicing your plan, can help reduce stress and give you some confidence in light of that reality.

Plan, prepare, practice, repeat…

Here’s a good example: All schools in the United States are required to establish and practice disaster related emergency preparedness plans ahead of any actual incidents. To help provide more comfort to parents and students, schools also schedule mock disaster scenarios. These events test preparedness for disasters such as fires, earthquakes, biological hazards, and the like so that students and faculty know what to do should a real incident happen.

Natural disaster preparedness drills help increase resilience in the event of an actual incident. (Source: Flickr)

In a similar fashion, companies can find benefits in creating a cyber resilience plan and running mock scenarios of cyber attacks (e.g. system compromise, data breach, malware outbreak, etc.). This helps gather a sense of how key company stakeholders such as IT, HR, Marketing, and Senior Leadership will respond in the event of an actual cyber-attack. These scenarios also help gauge how a company is doing in terms of meeting applicable compliance requirements and regulations for their industry.

Such a process helps an organization recognize gaps in their approach to people, processes, and technology so they can continuously adapt and make changes for improvement.

Cyber resilience is about anticipating attacks and executing a plan to both reduce risk and be able to recover as quickly as possible. (Source: Getty Images)

From a cyber resilience standpoint, proper cyber hygiene can be very challenging with traditional on-site security solutions due to the fact that they:
• Require significant manual effort to deploy and update
• Produce too many security alerts across too many dashboards
• Limit visibility within siloed solutions
• Provide limited assurances against natural disasters and physical security issues

But wait, there’s hope!

Microsoft’s approach embraces modern cloud automation, analytics, integrated tools, and vast pools of security data to help:
• Reduce manual efforts needed to resolve cyber hygiene tasks
• Ease the burden on human analysts
• Consolidate alerts to more centralized dashboards
• Provide high assurances against nearly all disaster types and physical security threats

For more information on how organizations in any industry can build a cyber resilience plan, take a look at this whitepaper.

We always love tips and feedback! If you have any tips or feedback on how to be more resilient in the physical or digital world, feel free to share with us. We would love to hear them from you.