cyberresilience

Cyberresilience refers to the ability of an organization to anticipate, withstand, recover from, and adapt to cyber incidents while maintaining critical operations. It encompasses not only cyber security controls but also business continuity, crisis management, and governance. While cyber security focuses on preventing breaches, cyber resilience emphasizes continued operation and rapid recovery when incidents occur.

Key elements of cyberresilience include governance and risk management, people and culture, processes, technology, and information. Activities span risk assessment, business impact analysis, incident response, disaster recovery, continuity planning, and crisis management. Technical measures often involve network segmentation, backups, redundancy, endpoint protection, detection capabilities, and threat intelligence. Organizational measures include training, clear roles and responsibilities, decision-making authority, and supplier risk management.

Frameworks and practices support the implementation of cyberresilience. Organizations commonly align with frameworks such as the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, NIST SP 800-160, and relevant ISO standards for information security and business continuity. Resilience is achieved through a mix of preventive controls, rapid detection, effective response, rapid recovery, and ongoing learning and adaptation. Regular testing, tabletop exercises, and adversary simulations, along with supply chain risk management, are important components.

Metrics and outcomes are used to gauge resilience performance. Key indicators include recovery time objective (RTO), recovery point objective (RPO), time to detect (TTD), and time to respond (TTR). Maturity assessments, post-incident reviews, and resilience testing inform improvements. Effective cyberresilience aims to minimize impact, maintain essential services, and shorten recovery cycles, even in the face of persistent or sophisticated threats.