A Resilient Organization Starts with Cyber Resilience —Here’s Why

Global events, such as recessions and pandemics, create enormous social and economic challenges that impact organizations and their management. From employee and customer satisfaction to financial difficulties, supply chain disruption and skyrocketing cyberattacks, top-level management oversees a wide range of concerns.

As business owners aim to address multiple challenges that may be a threat to their organizations’ success, resilience is a trending buzzword. Organizational resilience is an organization’s ability to foresee, plan for, respond to and adapt to gradual change and unexpected disruptions to survive and thrive.

Even during the most recent COVID-19 pandemic, organizations that already practiced methods to cultivate resilience through remote/hybrid work, digital acceleration and more, showed that they can quickly recover from setbacks and have an advantage over competitors.

If you want to prioritize resiliency within your own business, one of the first steps you should take is building cyber resilience. Cyber resilience refers to an organization’s ability to consistently deliver the desired outcome in the face of adverse cyber events.

Cyber Resilience Powers Transformation

According to Forrester, cyber resilience is more than just a security imperative. It’s the foundation of a strong business and brand. This is one of the reasons why over 65% of organizations are investing in improving their cyber resiliency posture.¹ Businesses across the globe have begun to realize that it’s time to look inward and identify and close security gaps to build a more resilient future.

While establishing cyber resilience, consider the following:

1. You must deploy tools to detect, evaluate and handle network and information system risks, including those that affect your supply chain.
2. It’s critical to identify irregularities and potential cybersecurity issues through continuous network and information system monitoring before they morph into severe threats.
3. Implementing an incident response strategy is crucial to ensure operational continuity where you can bounce back quickly even if you are the victim of a cyberattack.
4. Always ensure that your cyber resilience strategy is overseen by top management and integrated into day-to-day operations.

Companies that invested in cyber resilience expected to get the following results¹:

• Increased secure collaboration within the organization
• Better preparedness, response and/or remediation skills in the event of a security incident
• Improved integration of people, processes, and technology

How to Improve Your Cyber Resilience

• Employee training

Providing continual security awareness training to your employees enables them to identify threats and vulnerabilities. It enhances employees’ defensive abilities and prepares them to effectively deal with a crisis.

• Stay current with technological advances and the threat landscape

It’s crucial to keep up with the latest technology developments and threats. If you have no understanding of what you’re up against, you can’t protect your business.

• Reset your security systems

Regularly audit your digital and physical systems to identify vulnerabilities. Set the critical systems to their best available configurations to prevent unauthorized access.

• Adopt advanced technologies

Legacy technologies may be ineffective in dealing with today’s challenges. As a result, having the most up-to-date and effective technologies and tools to secure your organization is critical.

• Partner with Keystone Technology Consultants

Resiliency is no longer a choice but a necessity. However, it requires a significant amount of time, effort, and expertise. It’s always best to collaborate with an expert partner like us who can handle all resiliency and technology matters for you.

If you’re ready to take the first step towards building cyber resiliency in your organization but aren’t sure where to start, contact us to schedule a no-obligation consultation.

To help you understand organizational resilience in depth, we created a comprehensive guide for you. Download “The Ultimate Guide to Organizational Resilience” by clicking here.

Sources:

1. Cyber Resilience Study

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How to Support a Hybrid Workforce as Attack Surfaces Expand

Resilience remains a trending topic among organizations and individuals. The past 18 months
have brought about an abundance of change. Organizations and individuals that can find
meaningful ways to practice resilience in the face of change, from remote and hybrid working
to digital acceleration, are at a significant advantage.

Remember, change for the sake of it is never a good idea. What we’re discussing here is
strategic and necessary to enable continued success. Think digital transformation, remote
working technologies, etc. After all, being at the forefront of new technology and techniques
can not only take companies forward but also give them a competitive advantage.

Resilient organizations are receptive to change rather than being rigid in their stance. They
know the competition is fierce and it doesn’t take much to be displaced. You can’t count on last
year’s strategy to deliver effective results in tomorrow’s ecosystem.

Download the Ultimate Guide today: The-Ultimate-Guide-to-Organizational-Resilience-Nov-2021

The reality of security threats is that EVERY business faces them – even yours.  And frankly, even ours.  The security protection we provide is effective, but new threats continue to evolve.  Some of our clients have decided that the risk and exposure is just too great and that a higher level of security and sophistication is now needed.  You may also be considering an addition level of security.  In this issue, we discuss some of the new threats and an enhanced solution.

ed.  You may also be considering an addition level of security.  In this issue, we discuss some of the new threats and an enhanced solution.

Over the past few weeks, we shared some helpful info on remote work. These articles should help workers and IT smoothly and securely move to a remote work setting, but this creates the question, “How do I manage a remote workforce?” The principles of proper management are generally known, so a lot of this is the things we as managers and leaders should do.  But the disconnected nature of remote workers creates new challenges which is the focus here: how can we apply sound management principles to a remote workforce?

In this help guide, we want to share ways your workers can work from home.  While this is in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, many are finding it productive and helpful to work remotely.  There are two areas we will focus on, some useful tips to connect to your corporate network, and using Microsoft Teams to stay productive and connected. We’ll help answer some common questions about Remote Access and Teams.

In this time of concern about health and contact with others as a response to the Covid-19 (Coronavirus) pandemic, many are facing working at home for an extended period. We enjoy high connectivity and tend to work when not in the office, but it is often limited to checking our email on the phone, or perhaps an occasional day at home. But it is different between “getting” to work at home for a day and being forced to indefinitely.  To prepare for remote work for the next few weeks, consider the following tips. With good habits, you will likely find you are more productive, but potentially less satisfied; these should help.

Team Keystone representing at Karting For a Cause, hosted by HV Indoor Karting! Teams of 5 took turns racing during 2 heats and the fastest time earned the coveted First Place Prize. Keystone’s 5 man team comprised of Jon, Billy, Brice, Jason, and Ian! They put the pedal to metal and won First Place!

Proceeds from this event benefited Ears to You, a nonprofit dedicated to providing joy and hope to cancer patients of all ages through the donation of beautiful earrings, headscarves, hats and inspirational books.

For the next couple of issues we are going to really dig into not only security and protection from virus, hackers, and malware, but also what is needed to fully recover from a disaster and the ability to do that in a reasonable time so as to not interrupt your business flow.  An additional consideration is how to find the balance to do this cost effectively. In this issue, we will discuss the IT disaster recovery plan, the industry predictions, and a specific business continuity solution from Keystone. 

It is hard to imagine a business today that does not rely upon Information Technology systems. Even if it just emails and some files in a folder, losing access to them or the data in them, would likely be critical for the organization.  Keystone serves small to medium sized businesses, and at a minimum, every one of them have at least three critical systems: email, document files, and financial or ERP data. Most have several key applications, which may be housed on local systems, private clouds hosted by Keystone, or public clouds like Microsoft O365 and SalesForce.com.

Over the next few blog articles, we want to inform you about Disaster Recovery plans, technologies, gotchas, and other helpful info.

There are two groups that should be concerned with this: business leadership that are working for the long-term success of the organization, and internal IT leaders and engineers who need to manage these systems, or oversee those who do. We will try to address the needs of both. In this post, we are keeping it less “techie”, and engaging the business leadership.

Why do I need an IT Disaster Recovery Plan?

This is really a question of what is the Impact of Loss of Systems or Data?  A business leader is concerned with the losses involved in a disaster.  This can be roughly measured.  Just add the following:

• The cost to continue operations manually, with no systems support (if that is even possible). This would be a factor of employee or contracted labor costs * the number of hours to do the operation without systems * the cost per hour for each resource.
• The lost revenue due to cancelled orders.
• The cost of discounts in an attempt to satisfy unhappy customers.
• Long term lost revenue due to customers leaving and never coming back.
• The cost of any temporary IT measures (leasing equipment, added IT engineer labor costs at emergency rates, etc.).
• The cost of lost raw or finished goods due to expiration.
• The cost to enter or re-enter data when (and if) systems are restored.
• Higher employee turnover due to longer hours and more work.
• The lost good will value of the business due to lost market reputation.

Generally, you cannot assume your insurance policy will cover all of this.  In fact, like most insurance, your costs may increase as a result of a claim.  Some of these costs are almost inestimable.

These are all the costs and losses you will likely encounter, but the real issue the survivability of the organization.  A FEMA study showed that 40-60% of businesses that lose their data will never recover and will shut down.  This is because of the inherent value of the systems and data, and the inability to compete without them.

What is an IT Disaster Recovery Plan?

An IT Disaster Recovery Plan (IT DRP) is a formal plan to largely do two things: Avoid losses through protective measures and respond when production systems are lost. In the first case your IT Team will review all systems for vulnerabilities and monitor them for issues which may cause downtime. Examples of these issues are security breaches, equipment failure, and facility or geographical disasters.  In the second case, should one of the issues occur, there must be a written tested plan that can be enacted to quickly restore operations.

You may think that the chance of a hurricane, tornado, fire, etc. are so low, why bother with planning for that risk. But most IT DRPs are activated due to hardware failures (45%), security breaches, extended local power outages, internet outages, or personnel errors on systems.

It falls under the category of System and Organization Control (SOC) analysis, with a defined, written plan to account for every system and its business function, owners, how it is backed up, how and when it would be restored, a communications plan, a key contact list, and more.

The plan should consider the types of disasters that could occur; for example, a loss of the server room due to fire would require a different response than data being encrypted in a cybersecurity attack.

This plan must be reviewed regularly and updated with each significant system change.

When you consider the variance in all the factors, you must conclude there is no one-size-fits all plan. The structure or heading of the plan may be similar, but the content must reflect your organization, and be kept up to date as it changes.

Finally, the IT DRP is part of a broader Business Continuity plan, which may encompass elements like facilities, employee assistance, shifting operations to third parties, inventory replenishment, and communication with vendors and customers.

Consider Keystone’s Sarge for your IT Disaster Recovery Plan

Your systems and data are essential to your ongoing operations and long-term success. Keystone has developed a world class IT Disaster Recovery planning, backup, and recovery suite for small – midsized businesses (up to 1,000 users or more).   It is called SARGE by Keystone and provides tactical business continuity that will help you develop a technology plan and put it in place. restore the applications that run your business and get your entire IT infrastructure functional again.

Learn more about SARGE.

Next month we will consider the components of a good IT Disaster Recovery Plan.