Cyber Insurance and Resilience

Cyber Insurance

Technology has changed the world we live in – 50% of world population online who contribute to billions of interactions over internet on a daily basis. Business of the day is interwoven with technology – they are inseparable. Despite the opportunity harnessed from adoption of technologies in business there is need to address the risk of cyber attacks. Cyber attacks are inevitable; they have devastating effects on business and are getting more sophisticated day by day. Cyber resilience refers to the ability of an enterprise to run its operations despite an adverse cyber attack or data breach.

Cyber resilience aims to defend the organization against potential cyber attacks and ensure the organizations survival following an attack including minimizing customer harm, reputation damage and financial loss. Sophistication of the threat landscape can lead to catastrophic events to organizations – some may even go out of business. Organizations MUST accept that the inevitable will occur. Once that fact is accepted then focus should shift to how to reduce impact after a cyber attack/data breach.

Threat Landscape is ever evolving

Security experts agree that there are no silver bullets in cyber security. No one solution can protect your organization from cyber attacks. In addition, despite the best solutions & controls in place an organization can’t completely secure its information due to the fact the threat landscape keeps on evolving. There too many unknown unknown’s (Threats you don’t know and you don’t know that they exist) which pose a greater risk due to the fact you can’t anticipate for them based on past experiences. Organizations are putting an emphasis on cyber defense as they set up blue-teams to be on the lookout of the attacks targeting the organization and working tirelessly to defend the organization from those attacks. The defense strategy has even enhanced with breakthrough technologies that enable automated defense. Artificial Intelligence (AI) & machine learning are enhancing the security posture of organizations by enabling quick learning and identification of outliers which could be indicators of compromise. Automation in defense promotes prompt detection enabling organization to proactively respond to the attack.

Is Cyber Resilience necessary for a business?

It will happen

Today economy and business environment runs on an interconnected world. The reliance of technology creates efficiency and effectiveness in delivering organizations mission however the same technology can be compromised rendering the usefulness of the technology. Acknowledging that cyber attacks are part of the game is an important realization. Once that has been accepted an organization will stop jumping like a headless chicken whenever there is a data breach reported in the media. Secondly, the organization becomes laser focus on – Response & Recovery. Two elements that are critical survival trait during and after a successful cyber attack.

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