What Is Cyber Resilience and How Does It Work? A Complete Guide

• What is cyber resilience?
• How does cyber resilience work?
• Why cyber resilience is critical in business
• Goals of cyber resilience
• Benefits of effective cyber resilience
• 7 Key components of cyber resiliency
• Adopt principles of cyber resilience today

Cyber resilience is your organization’s ability to anticipate, withstand, and recover from cyber threats without stopping essential business operations. While cybersecurity primarily protects your systems from unauthorized access, cyber resilience takes a broader approach.

Cyber resilience prepares your business to handle inevitable incidents, like data breaches, while minimizing downtime and damage. It’s all about taking a holistic approach — mitigate cyber threats as much as possible, but when they happen, they don’t derail your business.

Cyber resilience isn’t a single solution, but rather a combination of proactive and reactive measures. At its core, cyber resilience balances these three aspects:

• Prevention: Implementing strong data security measures to minimize vulnerabilities and block cyber threats before they can cause harm.
• Detection: Continuously monitoring systems to identify potential threats in real time.
• Rapid response and recovery: Ensuring that when an attack occurs, your organization can quickly contain the threat and adapt to prevent future incidents.

It’s no longer a question of “if” a cyber threat will impact your business, but “when.” Without a cyber resilience strategy, your company could face costly challenges. Ransomware, for example, can lead to massive financial damages, including direct losses, regulatory fines, and legal fees. Beyond finances, operational disruptions or reputational damage could jeopardize your business’s long-term success.

A cyber resiliency strategy is beneficial for any company. However, it’s especially important for a few industries, including finance, healthcare, and ecommerce. Financial institutions protect extremely sensitive data for their customers and a breach could be catastrophic. Similar consequences entail for ecommerce companies that save credit card numbers. Healthcare organizations need to stay compliant with HIPAA and avoid compromising patient data. Cyber resiliency can help with all of the above.

A resilient organization is one that can withstand cyber incidents, recover quickly, and continue delivering services with minimal disruption. Below are five of the main objectives of a good cyber resiliency strategy.

A key objective of cyber resilience is to prevent cyber threats before they escalate into full-blown attacks. Organizations must adopt proactive security measures to identify and neutralize risks early such as:

• Penetration testing: Your team attempts to hack into your systems to pinpoint any vulnerabilities before attackers can exploit them.
• AI-driven security: Your organization uses machine learning and AI tools to more accurately detect potential threats as quickly as possible.
• Zero-trust models: Your security team puts access controls on the system where no one is trusted by default to reduce the attack surface.

Even the most secure organizations must prepare for the possibility of a cyber incident. A well-structured incident response plan involves extensive threat detection, protocols for how to properly escalate an incident, and role-based responsibilities to help everyone know what to do. Following these steps can help your organization contain an attack quickly, and minimize damage and recovery time.

Cyber resilience helps you continue operating despite a cyber threat, data breach, or system failure. To do this, your company will want to implement fail-safe mechanisms, such as failover systems that will automatically kick in or cloud redundancy copies that let you recover critical data quickly.

Cyber resilience helps you keep the trust of your customers, investors, and business partners. Demonstrating strong cyber resilience reassures stakeholders that you’re prepared to handle complications — in turn, strengthening your credibility to investors and reassuring customers that you value their data privacy.

Many industries require businesses to meet specific cybersecurity standards, so having a thorough cyber resilience plan can help you meet those regulations. Cyber resilience can help your organization stay complaint with frameworks and regulations such as:

• GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation)
• NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) Framework
• ISO 27001
• SOC 2 (System and Organization Controls 2)

By staying compliant, your organization can also avoid costly penalties and fines.

By embracing cyber resilience, your organization can do more than just survive — it can thrive. Let’s unpack the key benefits.

Every minute of downtime can lead to lost revenue and reduced productivity. Cyber resilience strategies are designed to minimize disruptions and speed up your recovery time from cyberattacks, system failures, or data breaches.

Being resilient helps your organization stay nimble and prepare for new threats. Your business can use AI threat intelligence, automation, or event monitoring to help make sure you’re more accurately and thoroughly monitoring your systems and ready to respond immediately. Automation also takes some of the workload off your security team to help them focus on strategic planning to adapt to emerging threats.

Prioritizing cyber resilience means also staying competitive. That’s because successfully handling and recovering from a cyber threat can help boost customer loyalty and industry trust. Ultimately, helping you stand out from your competitors.

Cyber resilience complements traditional cybersecurity by creating a multi-layered defense system. Instead of relying solely on prevention, resilience helps you better respond and recover from threats. Using both of these approaches gives you a more proactive security strategy and increases your defensive depth.

A cyberattack can severely erode customer trust and investor confidence, ultimately damaging your organization’s reputation. By implementing cyber resilience strategies, you can avoid these issues by demonstrating that you have a plan in place when issues arise.

A strong cyber resilience strategy is built on multiple foundational elements that work together to protect an organization from evolving cyber threats. The following seven key components are essential for an effective cyber resilience framework.

Being prepared means proactively assessing your risk landscape, identifying vulnerabilities, and establishing security frameworks to defend against potential cyber threats. You might start with regular risk assessments to find weak points. Then, provide extensive employee training to make sure your staff is aware of potential threats and security protocols.

Salesforce Shield, a suite of advanced data security products, can help you prevent, address, and monitor threats to sensitive information. Archiving data proactively minimizes your risk exposure by reducing the volume of sensitive information in your active environment. Explore tools, like Archive, to help manage large volumes of data and quickly surface and restore archived records as needed.

Timely threat detection keeps cyberattacks from escalating. A strong cyber resiliency plan will involve implementing real-time monitoring and threat intelligence to pinpoint anomalies and contain them as quickly as possible. In addition, you can use proactive threat hunting protocols where your security teams search for potential threats before they become a problem.

You’ll want a plan to respond quickly and isolate threats to minimize damage and restore operations. That typically includes incident containment and threat mitigation where you’ll isolate or remove malicious files to block off access to the rest of your system.

Cyber resilience is about bouncing back from incidents with minimal downtime. A recovery strategy will make sure you have regular data backups to quickly restore your systems and include a plan for what your company will do to restore your infrastructure safely. Tools like Salesforce Backup and Recover can protect your data with automated backups and swift, precise recovery. Having this plan helps you minimize operational disruptions and reduce downtime financial losses.

Include ways you’ll minimize and manage the inevitable risks of running your business. That could include creating a system to prioritize the most critical threats and regularly performing vulnerability scanning to patch up gaps in advance. You might also adopt industry frameworks like NIST Risk Management Framework (RMF), FAIR Model, and ISO 27005 to systematically address cyber risks.

Cyber resiliency involves having functions in place to help your company continue operating when something goes wrong. You could create backup servers and failover systems that will kick in during an outage — or an alternative workflow to help critical functions continue when the primary system is shut down.

Always prepare for worst-case scenarios to minimize long-term damage from cyber disasters. From a ransomware attack that encrypts critical data, a DDoS attack that takes customer-facing systems offline, or a data breach that exposes sensitive customer information — anything could happen.

Your plan might include procedures for restoring systems and resuming business-as-usual after something serious like that occurs. You’ll also want a communication plan to inform your employees, customers, and stakeholders.

Cyber threats are inevitable — but your organization’s ability to withstand, respond to, and recover from these threats is what matters. And cyber resiliency is how you do just that. If you’re looking for a platform to help support your cyber resilience, Salesforce can help. With Salesforce Security, you’re able to manage user permissions, create automated alerts, and create extensive policies to outline your resilience plan.

Ready to strengthen your cyber resilience strategy? Explore Salesforce Security solutions to protect your data, reduce downtime, and maintain customer trust.