It’s no surprise that security has remained a central topic in boardrooms worldwide. As application footprints rapidly expand and digital crime continues to grow, businesses are under immense pressure to safeguard their operations, services, and users from modern threats. However, how industry practitioners are approaching this challenge may be changing as organizations embrace new cyber readiness and resiliency strategies.
The Assume Breach Mindset
Cyber threats are stealthier and more sophisticated than ever. From supply chain breaches to living off-the-land techniques, bad actors often go unnoticed by disguising themselves as routine user, system, or network activity. It’s further compounded by the rise of AI, which has considerably increased adversary speed, effectiveness, and time-to-market.1 This constant innovation can challenge even the most security-mature organizations to identify threats within their own environment. On average, it takes 277 days for security teams to identify and contain a data breach,2 underscoring just how quiet and evasive modern threats can be. To tip the scales, cybersecurity experts have championed that businesses adopt an ‘assume breach’ or ‘zero trust’ mindset.3 This new approach advises that organizations always operate from a position of compromise, moving away from prevention-all-the-time strategies in favor of a more active defense framework.4 One that focuses on challenging and monitoring all users, behaviors, and traffic to unearth threats sooner and minimize their impact.
Fighting Through an Attack
Perimeter defenses will continue to play an integral part in security postures and represent the first line of defense against modern cyber threats. Yet one simple truth remains: it’s nearly impossible to capture and prevent the full breadth of today’s cyberattacks—especially as vulnerabilities and exploits evolve hourly.5 To face this new reality, organizations must refactor their strategies to prepare for disruption and better fight through an attack. By bracing critical functions to remain cyber resilient on a continual basis, businesses can shift into a more durable state, capable of withstanding successful attacks that bypass conventional perimeter defenses.6
A New, Holistic Cyber Model
As organizations embrace a more holistic approach to cyber readiness, experts suggest evolving current business continuity plans to equip stakeholders with the resources they need to better survive and bounce back from a successful attack.7
- New Tools
To keep stride with modern threats, organizations need new capabilities to identify vulnerabilities, monitor events, and recover applications and data faster. In doing so, businesses can better manage risk profiles and detect threats sooner while aligning remediation and eradication strategies with specific business needs.8 Experts also recommend that organizations establish mutually beneficial relationships with third-party services and solution providers to strengthen contingency plans and incorporate technologies deeper into incident playbooks.9 This enables businesses to maximize their investments while applying the latest security capabilities into existing workstreams. - New Processes
In addition to new tooling, businesses must also foster better collaboration and coordination between IT and security. This includes improving incident response practices used by cross-departmental teams.10 Documenting best practices and clearly outlining individual responsibilities can help organizations eliminate gaps while creating shared processes that build better synergies between groups. It’s also recommended that businesses routinely practice their incident response plans to proactively identify bottlenecks and ensure stakeholders stay up to date with the latest practices.11 This can keep businesses well-versed and ready to respond to an attack, prior to ever stepping into a live scenario. - New Development Practices
Most businesses today are in the middle of application modernization or digital transformation initiatives. While protecting existing or legacy environments requires applying security investments on top of already established services, new, strategic projects offer the opportunity to embed cybersecurity investments earlier in application development and deployment lifecycles—from the start. This conversion moves cybersecurity from an afterthought to a core element of transformation efforts and eases the process of adding incremental capabilities over time.12 It can also help organizations satisfy secure-by-design government mandates by implementing security as a bedrock component across the application development processes.13
As the threat landscape rapidly changes, cyber resilience will continue to play an increasingly important role. Through meticulous planning, strategic investment, and effective implementation, businesses can augment existing security strategies to minimize cyber incidents and limit their impact on operations.
- Barracuda, How AI is Changing Ransomware and How You Can Adapt to Stay Protected, Nov 2023
- IBM, Cost of a Data Breach Report 2023, 2023
- Upguard, Assume Breach Mentality vs. Supply Chain Attacks in 2024, Jan 2024
- Microsoft, Implement Security Breach Prevention and Recovery Infrastructure
- Harvard Business Review, Software Defined Perimeter Marker Report, Apr 2023
- Information Weekly, Why Cyber Resilience May Be More Important Than Cybersecurity, Feb 2024
- GrantThorton, Cyber Resilience Beyond BCM, Feb 2023
- BreachLock, 3 Strategies to Strengthen Enterprise Cybersecurity Risk Management, Feb 2024
- Gartner, Gartner Identifies the Top Cybersecurity Trends for 2024, Feb 2024
- TechTarget, Build a Strong Cyber Resilience Strategy with Existing Tools, Oct 2023
- Hitachi, Incident Response Planning in a Nutshell: Best Practices
- Accenture, State of Cybersecurity 2023, 2023
- CISA, Secure by Design, Oct 2023
