This intro may be a bit dramatic, but that’s because cybercrimes are on the rise. The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) released recent findings claiming that 2023 was a record year for cybercrime complaints, exceeding 12.5 billion USD in damages. If that doesn’t scare you into believing you could be next, I don’t know what will.
This isn’t just an American problem, either. Globally, the average cost of a data breach amounted to about 4.88 million USD, according to Statista as of February 2024. Cybersecurity Ventures predicts ransomware attacks will cost around 265 billion USD annually by 2031. So, this isn’t something to ignore. The problem continues to grow and businesses of all industries and sizes need to start planning on how to survive cyberattacks once they inevitably happen.
Just like we as IT channel innovators like to put an “as a service” tag to everything we do, so do hackers. Have you heard of the ransomware as a service (RaaS) model? Basically, ransomware creators are selling or leasing their malware to other criminals and cyber outlaws. Oh yeah—they have a whole business plan around it now. There are even affiliates and profit-sharing models to RaaS. And if there’s enough of a need to generate a business model like RaaS, it could go much further.
Oftentimes, a business thinks if they have a simple backup and recovery strategy, they’ll be covered for getting back to operational after an attack. Unfortunately, if the backup copy is corrupted, then restoring it will also lead to further damage. The same thought process is applied to cybersecurity. This is where cyber resiliency comes in handy.
It’s worth discussing the differences between them all:
Backup and recovery is primarily rooted in restoring data or systems after something goes wrong.
Cybersecurity is solely focused on preventing threats and defending from attacks.
Cyber resiliency is about ensuring an organization’s ability to withstand and recover from cyberattacks while continuing to be operational.
It boils down to this: do you have a plan for operational continuity? That’s what cyber resiliency is all about—combining both backup and recovery with cybersecurity to ensure you can be operational even when you’re attacked and be able to recover safely and quickly. In order to achieve this, it’s important to identify the minimum viable company (MVC), or what portion of the business and data is mission critical to be successful.
MVC is typically focused on things like core operations, customer support, IT infrastructure, compliance and risk management, and financial management. Once you and your customers identify those things for their business, you can help them come up with a cyber resiliency strategy. Technically IT can also help develop a cyber resiliency plan.
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