Martin Lewis, Cyber & Operational Sales Manager at Daisy gives you 6 compelling reasons you should be integrating cyber resilience into your business continuity planning.
Where change and technological advancement are constant, businesses face a dual imperative: the need to remain agile in response to evolving circumstances while also ensuring robust cyber resilience measures to safeguard continuity. As you navigate the complexities of a constantly shifting landscape, the integration of business continuity planning and cyber resilience becomes paramount.
Integrating business continuity and cyber security
Business continuity planning and cyber resilience are interdependent components of a comprehensive risk management strategy. Business continuity plans outline procedures for maintaining essential functions during disruptions, while cyber resilience safeguards against threats to the integrity, confidentiality, and availability of data and systems.
Integrating cyber resilience into business continuity planning is crucial for organisations to effectively manage risks and ensure resilience in the face of evolving threats.
But why? Here are six compelling reasons why this integration is essential:
1. Comprehensive risk management:
By integrating your cyber incident response plan into business continuity planning, organisations can adopt a more comprehensive approach to risk management. Cyber threats, such as data breaches, ransomware attacks, and phishing scams, pose significant risks to operations and can disrupt business continuity. By considering cyber resilience alongside other threats, organisations can identify vulnerabilities, assess potential impacts, and develop proactive strategies to mitigate risks effectively.
2. Protecting digital assets:
Without adequate cyber resilience measures such as threat detection and four-eyes authentication in place, assets are vulnerable to theft, manipulation, or destruction by malicious actors. Integrating proactive cyber resilience measures into business continuity plans ensures that digital assets are adequately protected against cyber threats, safeguarding your organisation’s reputation, competitiveness, and continuity of operations.
3. Minimising downtime and disruption:
Cyber attacks and security breaches can cause significant downtime and disruption to business operations, resulting in lost productivity, revenue, and customer trust. By integrating cyber resilience into business continuity planning, you can develop strategies to minimise the impact of cyber incidents on operations and swiftly recover critical systems and data. This proactive approach helps reduce downtime and disruption, enabling organisations to maintain continuity of essential functions and services. Analysing backups as they are taken for anomalies flags up early when things are not quite right.
4. Adhering to compliance requirements and regulatory obligations:
Many industries are subject to regulatory requirements and compliance standards related to cyber resilience and data protection. Failure to comply with these regulations can result in financial penalties, legal liabilities, and reputational damage. By integrating cyber resilience into business continuity planning, you can ensure you meet regulatory obligations related to data security, privacy, and incident reporting. This not only helps avoid potential fines and legal consequences but also enhances trust and credibility with customers and stakeholders.
5. Enhancing organisational posture:
Incorporating cyber resilience into business continuity planning strengthens your security posture by proactively addressing cyber risks and vulnerabilities. By considering the potential impact of cyber incidents on business operations and continuity, you can develop proactive strategies to detect, prevent, and respond to cyber threats effectively. This proactive approach enhances your organisation’s ability to adapt to changing circumstances, withstand disruptions, and recover swiftly from cyber incidents, ultimately enhancing overall resilience and long-term sustainability.
It is important that you make full use of the tools you have and integrate them where you can because it’s not a matter of if but when you get a breach. It’s then you need to know the process of recovery is tested and works.
6. Eliminating cyber resilience blind spots:
An effective integration between business continuity and cyber security, helps identify potential gaps in overall cyber resilience that can be missed when organisations analyse these elements independently. Siloed working can result in a blinkered view of organisational risk, whilst missing out on the synergies that combined business continuity and security planning can bring to the table. When organisational functions work collaboratively in these areas in a holistic manner, it ensures a common understanding of requirements and associated challenges. This provides clarity of mission and enables a platform for fine tuning the critical interdependencies of both business continuity and cyber incident response plans.
Conclusion
Integrating cyber resilience into business continuity planning is essential for organisations to effectively manage risks, protect digital assets, minimise downtime and disruption, comply with regulatory requirements, and enhance organisational resilience. By taking a holistic approach to risk management that considers both physical and digital threats, organisations can strengthen their security posture, safeguard continuity, and thrive in an increasingly complex and interconnected business environment.
Embracing business agility
The ability to swiftly adapt to changing circumstances is a hallmark of success. Being agile is being able to pivot strategies, reallocate resources, and embrace innovation in response to emerging opportunities or threats. By fostering a culture of flexibility and resilience, businesses can navigate disruptions more effectively and maintain operational continuity.
Leveraging technology for agility
Technology serves as a catalyst for business agility, enabling organisations to streamline processes, enhance communication, and facilitate remote collaboration. Cloud computing, digital collaboration tools, and automation solutions empower teams to work seamlessly across geographies and time zones, ensuring business operations remain uninterrupted in the face of disruptions.
However, the rapid adoption of technology also introduces risks. As businesses rely increasingly on digital infrastructure and remote work arrangements, they become more susceptible to cyber threats, meaning cyber resilience and business continuity need to be prioritised.
Having identified critical services and mapped the business impacts of these, forward thinking organisations are provisioning cyber resiliency measures and plans for when a breach may occur.
About the Author
Martin Lewis, Cyber & Operational Sales Manager at Daisy has more than 27 years of experience across the full spectrum of the IT industry, having held positions at leading vendors, distributers, resellers and service providers. Now leading the Cyber and Operational Resilience Sales Specialists team at Daisy, he and his team strive to ensure our solutions meet or exceed customer demands around governance, compliance, cyber security, operational resilience and risk management.
Working with an award-winning team of business continuity management, cyber security and IT service continuity consultants, Martin and his team cement Daisy’s presence as a leading provider of Operational Resilience solutions in the UK.