Cyber Resilience Vs. Business Continuity – All You Need to Know

Editor's Note: Take a look at our featured best practice, Business Continuity Plan (BCP) Template (20-page Word document). A Business Continuity Plan (BCP) is a plan to continue operations if a place of business is affected by different levels of disaster which can be localized short term disasters, to days long building wide problems, to a permanent loss of a building. Such a plan typically explains how the [read more]

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When running a business, you need to understand that there are things that can always go wrong. You also need to understand potential disruptions, risks, and threats for you to be able to implement measures to prevent and eliminate them.

Apart from eliminating these risks, understanding them also helps you minimize the negative impact that they might have on your business. Different businesses have mapped and analyzed the main risks and threats businesses face each year.

Some of the most common risks for businesses include cyber incidents. This is because of advancements in technology making digital solutions quite important in the daily running of organizations. Things such as cyberattacks, data breaches, and unexpected outages are common in businesses. They are mostly caused by third-party and supply chain attacks.

Cyber Resilience

If you talk to an executive from a modern business, they will tell you that cyber incidents are among the most common threats to their businesses. For instance, business executives argue that cyber incidents make the top three list of the main risks to their businesses.

This is what makes cyber resilience important for businesses. As discussed above, digitization has become an integral part of the daily operations of businesses. This has led to increased incidences of cyber-attacks and data breaches.

As a result, businesses are now approaching cyber resilience as a part of their risk management measures to foster business continuity. Planning for business continuity is essential when it comes to cyber resilience.

It is important to note that cyber resilience is quite new in the business world. This does not mean that businesses have not been trying to introduce measures that foster business continuity. It means that the term was recently coiled, and different people might define it differently.

Most of the time, the term is limited to things like cyberattacks and cybercrime. However, it involves more than just that. You can use it to define different cyber incidents in the business world. Cyber resilience is important for business continuity.

Importance of Cyber Resilience and How It Fosters Business Continuity

Increased digitization across different industries has ensured that cyber is now one of the most important and core functions in all business processes. This means that a business can be paralyzed due to cyber incidents affecting its IT systems or digital infrastructure.

In addition, businesses are implementing hybrid cloud solutions, meaning that they have a mixed infrastructure that is susceptible to cyber-attacks. With such a solution, they need to ensure that they have a hybrid cloud observability strategy. Fortunately, they can try it at SolarWinds.

This way, businesses can monitor their technology infrastructure and detect any issues or errors that might affect their performance. These issues are then addressed in real-time before end users can detect any changes in service delivery. But what is business continuity?

Business continuity can be defined as the ability of businesses to ensure that their essential functions are maintained even during and after the occurrence of a disaster. Different disasters might affect the performance of a business, with cyber incidents being one of the most popular ones.

Fortunately, businesses have a lot of tools at their disposal to monitor, manage, and maintain their systems and ensure that they meet their performance expectations. They also have other tools to keep backups of the current state of their systems just in case something happens. This is cyber resiliency.

With monitoring, they can detect any cyber attacks before they affect their entire technology infrastructures. This makes it easy for them to revert such attacks and ensure that the core functions of their businesses continue without interruptions.

In situations where their systems or just part of them are compromised, then the impact on their businesses might lead to losses. Fortunately, they can make use of their backup systems.

Here, they can find different states of their systems and restore the last state before the systems were compromised. This way, they will ensure that their businesses continue operations with minimal to no interference. This ensures business continuity.

Questions Businesses Need to Address

Finally, when setting up cyber resiliency for business continuity, businesses need to look at several factors. The most important of them all is the impact that cyber incidents have on business operations.

The impact depends on several things. Some of them include the time that business systems are not available, how critical the affected systems are, the stolen or lost data, the nature of the cyber incidence, and the cybercriminals behind the attack, among others.

Answering these questions is going to make it easy for businesses to ensure that there is business continuity even when they are under attack.

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