Developing a cybersecurity business continuity plan
As we enter a new era of cybersecurity threats, which has led to the emergence of new vulnerabilities, organisations are constantly challenged on how to best respond to these evolving attacks. The threat landscape is more complex than ever, causing organisations to grapple with new tactics to safeguard their critical data but in a way that doesn’t hamper the business.
This means collaboration, care, and proactive planning need to be part of CISO toolbox as worsening threat environments become the new normal. CISOs need to adjust processes and implement a robust cybersecurity business continuity plan so businesses can continue to thrive without disruption. But at the same time CISOs must align security with business goals, ensuring it supports innovation and business continuity, rather than creating roadblocks. This requires understanding business priorities, knowing where to focus efforts, integrating security seamlessly into operations and fostering a security culture.
CISOs must align security with business goals, ensuring it supports innovation and business continuity, rather than creating roadblocks. Share on X
Harmonising productivity advancements with robust security measures
Balancing business productivity innovations such as artificial intelligence with responsible security is a prime example of the tension that CISOs face. While AI promises improved decisions, automation, and leveraging staff more efficiently, it also requires unprecedented data access to function properly, which is very attractive for threat actors.
CISOs must adopt a multi-disciplinary approach with strong offensive security and threat intelligence powering a proactive approach to tackling vulnerabilities. They must adopt secure habits and practices to maintain the security of their digital environments. This includes ensuring effective data protection measures to help the organisation maintain the integrity and confidentiality of their information, whatever the scale of cyber threats.
The importance of clean rooms
Robust incident response is essential to minimise damage in the event of an attack, with specific incident recovery plans and procedures tailored to the recovery of data during a cyber breach. Typically, threat actors will corrupt an organisation’s data and systems. Therefore, it is imperative that backups are not only immutable but are also recovered and analysed first in an isolated environment, known as a clean room, to avoid the recovery of infected data and systems. This increases the guarantee of recovery after experiencing a breach, as the data is no longer susceptible to the same risks as other data in the live production environment. Clean rooms play a critical role in conducting forensic analysis, by validating the data’s integrity and usability to ensure the systems are free from any malware before recovery.
Growing regulatory requirements
Adhering to regulatory requirements and governance frameworks is vital for maintaining cyber resilience. This includes regulations such as GDPR, NIS2 and DORA. Integrating compliance into the organisation’s security strategy not only helps avoid legal penalties but also enhances overall security. By implementing necessary controls and procedures, CISOs can demonstrate their commitment to protecting sensitive data and maintaining operational integrity.
The cyber landscape is constantly evolving, which necessitates a mindset of continuous improvement to remain agile and capable of responding to the dynamic nature of cyber threats.
Continuous improvement
Learning from past incidents, staying on top of industry best practices, embracing innovations and adapting to new threats are essential for maintaining an effective cybersecurity posture. This means CISOs must regularly review and update their cyber and business continuity strategies and policies.
And finally, CISOs should ensure that those responsible for business continuity and cyber security work together to create cohesive plans and budget accordingly. Business continuity and incident response teams will struggle to meet their objectives if they do not have adequate budget, employee accountability and business-wide process compliance. Often a separate cyber security team is responsible for mitigating cyber threats and this team does not freely share with business continuity planners the results of cyber risk assessments and the planned responses to these risks. Likewise, cyber security specialists are not always aware of the organisation’s business continuity strategy.
Sustaining long term business continuity
Ultimately, CISOs need to ensure these teams are working together effectively. They must safeguard the organisation’s assets and sustain long-term business continuity in order to earn trust from customers and stakeholders in today’s complex threat landscape.