Bounce back better: Building cyber resiliency for your hyper connected enterprise

[Timothy_Ferrell]

The events of the past eighteen months have revealed some risky weaknesses in companies’ business continuity and disaster recovery programs. Join us for a free webinar, Thursday May 27 at 9:00 a.m. PDT, to learn about a better way.

The unexpected impact of COVID-19 pushed companies to do some serious re-thinking of their business continuity and disaster recovery strategies. The need for capabilities that enable organizations to bounce back from adverse events has never been more urgent.

In an upcoming HPE webinar, my colleague Lois Boliek and I will be talking about a new, broader approach to resilience: Cyber Resiliency for the Hyper Connected Enterprise. Lois is the Senior Director of HPE’s Security, Risk and Compliance Practice. I hope you can join us on Thursday, May 27, at 9:00 a.m. PDT. We’ll cover the basic concepts of cyber resiliency and explain how it takes survivability and cyber security to a new level. And we’ll look at how you can build it into your technology foundation to protect your business operations.

As one of the presenters of the webinar, I was asked by John Cummings, editor of the Cloud Experience Everywhere blog, to share some thoughts on cyber resiliency. Here’s part of our discussion:

John Cummings: How would you describe the difference between traditional business continuity/disaster recovery and cyber resiliency?

Timothy Ferrell: One man’s thoughts on this … BC/DR focused on recoverability, which was the ability to quickly and efficiently return business operations to a normal state after a single-point-in-time “disaster” event. The impact of COVID showed us clearly that this type of thinking alone would not ensure the level of survivability that modern enterprises require. 

Cyber resiliency is much broader in scope, and it puts a hard focus on the ability to sustain business operations (underpinned by technology operations) through any type of adversity. If you can resist and respond to adversity effectively, you may never need to go through a recovery exercise.

John: Are companies putting more budget towards cyber resiliency as a result of the pandemic?

Tim: Yes, there’s some evidence of that. A Capgemini study in March found that 75% of security respondents have increased their budgets in response to COVID-19, and 66% are investing in cyber resiliency this year.¹

John: As companies continue to shift towards a hybrid workplace, what resiliency trends and strategies do you expect to accelerate?

Tim: Again, just my opinion, but I expect to see companies evolve their traditional BC/DR programs to the broader realm of cyber resiliency. This will require different thinking than was used for “vanilla” BC/DR, and it will require the adoption of techniques, tools and practices that were not formerly addressed by the BC/DR plan.

Companies will start to take a look at authoritative publications like the National Institute of Standards and Technology's Special Publication 800-160, Volume 2, which offers a framework for engineering secure and reliable systems – treating adverse cyber events as both resiliency and security issues.² In particular, 800-160 identifies fourteen techniques that can be used to improve resiliency.

Companies should also look at the Cyber Resilience Review (CRR), which is a framework for the assessment of an entity's resiliency created by the Department of Homeland Security.³

I hope you can join us for the webinar – here’s the link again: Cyber Resiliency for the Hyper Connected Enterprise. Register today!

Learn how HPE can help you strengthen organizational resilience by enabling a secure, seamless and safe digital workplace for employees across sites, facilities, home offices – and everywhere in between.

Learn more about security risk management services from HPE Pointnext Services.

Related articles:

• Enterprise security moves to the edge via HPE's Enterprise.nxt

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1. 2020 Capgemini Cyber Resilience Study

2. NIST, Computer Security Resource Center: Developing Cyber Resilient Systems: A Security Engineering Approach

3. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency: Assessments: Cyber Resilience Review

Timothy Ferrell
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

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