Sometimes lines are blurry. Or more to the point, sometimes they "sound" blurry—paradoxically enough—because of similar or shared terminology. Such is the case with “cyber resilience,” which often is mistakenly considered just the term du jour for cybersecurity.
If the difference between cyber resilience and cybersecurity has thrown you, you’re in good company. Even seasoned MSPs and other IT industry folk mix them up (even when they think they have them right). And if people on our side of the IT fence get their wires crossed, it’s a safe bet that many of your clients have mixed them up, as well.
Here’s the difference…
Cyber Resilience Is About Continuity And Recovery, Not Only Prevention
Cyber resilience isn't just about creating a secure network. It's also about how to quickly recover when things break down and preparing for future threats in the event of another attack. One way of looking at cyber resilience is as a marriage between cybersecurity and business continuity.
Cyber resilience is a superior risk profile to cybersecurity because it assumes that a breach or other cyber failure will occur. To be clear, cyber resilience incorporates cybersecurity measures to avoid this outcome, so it’s not a matter of laying down your cyber arms and rebooting operations over and over. The ideal result of any cyber resilience strategy is to avoid an outage, period, which means cybersecurity front-and-center.
However, cybercrime is rampant, and the long-predicted outcome of “it’s not if you’ll be breached, but when” has become a truism for most companies and institutions of all sizes. In this light, ensuring that an organization’s core products or services are delivered, even when cyberattacks are successful, is a prudent objective for companies of all sizes.
Cyber resilience aims to help companies:
- Avoid downtime altogether, or
- Recover from an attack quickly enough to avoid catastrophic disruption
Another way of looking at cyber resilience is that it can turn your clients into movie heroes that take bullets or arrows but still manage to meet their objectives and save the day.
5 Simple And Affordable Cyber Resilience Layers For Your Clients
The threat landscape is complicated, but that doesn’t mean your cyber resilience solution needs to be – —at least in terms of deployment, management and efficiency. To meet today’s threats toe-to-toe, your clients need five layers of resilience:
- Automated, incremental and always-on data backup
- Personnel training to reduce the success of phishing attacks
- Dangerous website blocking
- Incoming threat protection
- Fast data restoration following an incident
The Bottom Line On Differences Between Cyber Resilience And Cybersecurity
The differences between cyber resilience and cybersecurity may sound trivial to your clients, but they make a world of difference when an attack or other cyber outage occurs. Equipping your clients to weather those instances without suffering catastrophic monetary or reputation losses is more effective and affordable than most SMBs realize. It’s just a matter of selecting the right solutions for the job.