Why and How to Embrace Cyber Resilience
You know that you need to protect your business against cyberattacks, which are constantly increasing in both frequency and intensity.
The key to protecting against these risks is to invest in more than just attack prevention. You can’t stop every attack. Instead, you must build a cyber resilience strategy, which ensures that you are prepared to contain an incident and mitigate its impact when your defenses are breached.
But because cyber resilience planning tends to receive less attention than cyberattack defense, it can be difficult to know where to start when planning for resilience. Keep reading for an overview of how to approach resilience planning, particularly in the maritime industry. These insights are based on our eBook, “The Ultimate Guide to Maritime Cyber Resilience.”
Where maritime cyber resilience starts
The first step in planning for cyber resilience is to recognize that cyber attacks are almost inevitable. “Traditional” cyber security measures, which focus on attack prevention rather than attack response, aren’t enough to guarantee business continuity, since it’s very likely that at least some attacks will slip past your defenses.
Thus, cyber resilience requires a change in your organization’s attitude. Maritime cyber security and response must become everyone’s concern – not just a job that falls to the IT team, which is tasked with erecting cyber defenses.
Businesses may also benefit from hiring an agency or consultant who knows the ins and outs of both cyber defense and cyber resilience. Consultants can help with planning, decision-making, security posture development and response capability implementation. They’re especially beneficial in industries like shipping and logistics, which faces unique challenges when it comes to cyber security and resilience.
Talk to us about these unique challenges to see how we can help.
Steps to cyber resilience for maritime
Once you’ve recognized the importance of cyber resilience and achieved buy-in from across your organization, you can begin implementing a resilience strategy.
The particulars of cyber resilience planning will depend on your business’s unique needs. But the basic steps toward maritime cyber resilience include:
- Assessing your needs and goals: Perform a security assessment to determine which risks you face, then use this assessment to set appropriate goals for your cyber resilience strategy.
- Establishing a plan: Formulate a comprehensive plan that addresses how you’ll shift from business-as-usual operations to emergency operations during an incident.
- Planning for continuity: Be sure you have steps in place to maintain normal operations during an incident. Your plans should address disruptions to IT systems as well as operational equipment and infrastructure, since you’ll need to keep both of these assets operational to maintain continuity.
- Assigning roles and responsibilities: Make it clear who will do what during cyber incident response. From management to individual team members, everyone needs to be certain what their responsibilities are.
Practice cyber drills
Simply planning for resilience is not enough. Equally important is carrying out cyber drills, which are an opportunity to test your plans, identify overlooked issues and confirm that your team is actually ready to handle a real-world cyber incident.
Cyber drills also allow your teams to develop “muscle memory,” allowing them to respond more quickly and efficiently to actual cyber incidents.
Conclusion
As we have clearly stated, cyber defenses alone aren’t enough for keeping pace with the relentless barrage of threats that modern businesses face. This is even more of an issue in the maritime and logistics industry, where attacks can disrupt not just IT systems, but also the critical operational systems that move goods across large networks.
For complete details on why and how to establish a maritime cyber security strategy, read our eBook, “Maritime Resiliency Starts Here”. It will walk you through the steps and stages of cyber resilience planning and it additionally explains in depth how to perform cyber drills.
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