A new buzzword has taken center stage in the digital world: resilience. In a world where data flows ceaselessly, businesses pivot at a moment’s notice, and unforeseen risks hide in the shadow of IT devices, resilience has become more than just a management buzzword – it’s a strategic imperative.
What is Resilience Management?
Resilience management encompasses an organization’s strategic processes and practices to ensure their ability to proactively anticipate, effectively prepare for, promptly respond to, and adapt in the face of disruptions, challenges, or crises, all while safeguarding critical business functions. It involves systematically identifying vulnerabilities, establishing risk crisis and resilience management strategies, and rigorously testing them to enhance an organization’s capacity to withstand and recover from adversity.
In the realm of cyber risk management, risk and resilience management refers to a comprehensive approach that focuses on an organization’s ability to anticipate, withstand, recover from, and adapt to cyber threats. It involves proactive measures to prevent cyber incidents, robust incident response strategies, and ongoing adaptation to the evolving threat landscape. Cyber resilience management integrates cybersecurity practices with broader business continuity and risk management principles to ensure an organization’s sustained functioning and reputation in the digital age.
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How To Manage Resilience
To manage a resilience strategy, organizations can employ a set of practical guidelines to achieve operational resilience:
- Identifying Important Business Services
Businesses must identify their IBS (important business services). IBSs are services whose disruption could:
- cause intolerable levels of harm from which consumers cannot easily recover.
- pose a risk to the safety and soundness of the organization
- impact on market stability of the sector
Organizations should list the full suite of services they offer and then select which would be categorized as “important.” The definition of “importance” should be based on a service being provided to an external end user (not an internal service such as payroll) and have the potential to threaten business objectives in the event of a disruption.
- Mapping IBS
Following the selection of essential business services, organizations must map all IBSs to the resources that support and assist in operating each service. For example:
- People: Suppliers, consultants, developers, third and fourth-party vendors
- Processes: Product development, shipping, logistics, programming, recruitment
- Technology: Cloud-based services, software, applications, digital systems
- Information: Databases, internal records, documentation
Third-party vendors that support IBSs are included in the mapping process and must comply with requirements regarding operational resilience management policies. Vendor risk management and supply chain assessment should be explored at this stage of resilience development.
- Impact Tolerance Levels
Once business services have been established and mapped to supporting resources, the logical next step would be to delineate how and to what extent a given IBS and its underlying resources will tolerate disruption to regular operation. Impact tolerance is an expression of the endurance level and time duration that a service is prepared to continue operations while tolerating the disruption.
An impact tolerance statement refers to the impact the company can tolerate before irredeemable harm is caused to customers, markets, or the organization itself. Impact tolerance (unlike risk appetite) does not measure the likelihood of specified risks since it assumes the disruption has already materialized.
- Scenario Testing
Testing must demonstrate the organization’s ability to stay within its impact tolerances. A solid testing strategy should incorporate the risks and vulnerabilities that will surface in the event of severe but plausible scenarios and then demonstrate how they will be remediated promptly. The experience gained from this testing can then further educate the enterprise on monitoring operational risk resilience and increasing their overall endurance. Threat modeling can be implemented for scenario testing in cyber security operations.
Ethical Considerations in Resilience Management
As resilience management takes center stage in the digital world, it raises ethical questions. Prioritization becomes a contentious issue – should organizations focus primarily on protecting their interests, or should they extend their resilience efforts to safeguard the broader community? Equity is another ethical concern; not all stakeholders may benefit equally from resilience strategies, potentially exacerbating existing disparities.
Balancing short-term gains with long-term sustainability is a tightrope walk. The pursuit of immediate profits can sometimes lead organizations to compromise their long-term resilience.
Centraleyes provides security teams valuable support by offering pre-populated integrated risk and compliance frameworks in this endeavor. Our platform automates data collection across these frameworks and streamlines risk assessment and mitigation, empowering organizations with real-time insights to thrive resiliently in a rapidly evolving environment.
Start Getting Value With
Centraleyes for Free
See for yourself how the Centraleyes platform exceeds anything an old GRC
system does and eliminates the need for manual processes and spreadsheets
to give you immediate value and run a full risk assessment in less than 30 days
