What's the Baseline for Cyber Resilience?

Cyber resilience is an organization’s ability to bounce back, keep the lights on, and maintain smooth operations, even after a cyber incident. At its core, resilience isn't just about protection — it's about survival.  

As cyber threats become increasingly complex and business operations more dependent on digital infrastructure, it's crucial to understand what being cyber resilient really means.

In this blog post, I’ll discuss what the baseline for cyber resilience is and how a Zero Trust security strategy grounded in microsegmentation can help you build a resilient infrastructure.

Defining cyber resilience: A day-after mindset

Imagine waking up the day after a cyber incident and being able to say, "We're still running." That's resilience.  

It’s not just about the initial defenses against breaches. It's about ensuring that when the unexpected hits, operations can continue, client services remain uninterrupted, and damage is contained. Cyber resilience is about preparing for the day after the worst happens.  

This day-after mindset is the same way we think about personal finances. It’s important to have at least three to six months of emergency funds — an amount that will look different for everyone. These savings give you peace of mind for your unique financial situation. But more importantly, they help you financially survive when something bad happens, such as a job loss, illness, or catastrophe.  

Just as you build emergency funds tailored to your unique financial needs, organizations must develop resilience based on their specific business structure, risk exposure, and industry. There’s no one-size-fits-all. Resilience is as unique as the risks and threats an organization faces.

Cyber resilience isn’t new — but it matters now more than ever

If you’ve been in cybersecurity for the last few decades, you know that cyber resilience isn’t anything new. We’ve had business continuity and disaster recovery planning for as long as organizations have been investing in cybersecurity.

But resilience has evolved from these early beginnings to address the unique demands of today’s world. Business operations now intertwine deeply with IT systems: think internet banking, e-commerce, or telehealth. If these digital operations are down, the entire business is, effectively, out of service. Resilience isn’t just a cybersecurity concern. It’s an operational imperative.

2 benchmarks for cyber resilience

Establishing a baseline for resilience requires focusing on both preventing and containing a breach or ransomware attack.  

Here are foundational practices every organization should consider:

• Prevention from the start of a breach: This is where traditional cybersecurity tools like firewalls and endpoint detection and response systems (EDRs) come into play. These tools protect your network perimeter and aim to keep attacks from starting.

• Breach containment: Prevention alone isn’t enough to secure against today’s sophisticated attacks. This is where most organizations fall short. The goal with breach containment is to stop a threat from spreading once it’s entered your network. Containment is your second line of defense and, without it, even the most secure perimeter can be quickly compromised.

The strategy that countries used to manage the COVID-19 pandemic is a good parallel example. They initially tried to keep the virus out by closing borders and stopping travel; this was the prevention attempt. But once it was inside, they shifted to containment with social distancing, mask mandates, and more. Similarly, organizations must be prepared with both perimeter defenses and containment strategies to manage internal threats and limit their impact if they get inside.

Why Zero Trust is essential to cyber resilience

Zero Trust is a cybersecurity framework that enforces resilience. Zero Trust means never assuming implicit trust in anything or anyone within your network. Whether it’s people, devices, networks, workloads, or data, Zero Trust demands verification at every stage, minimizing the risk of an incident.

Think of Zero Trust as a guiding principle for resilience. If you assume that breaches will happen, you build a network that’s ready to handle them without devastating impact.  

This is why I view Zero Trust as both a business and operational strategy. It’s not about restricting access but about ensuring that if someone or something goes rogue, the damage stops there.

The role of microsegmentation in resilience

Microsegmentation — a foundational pillar of Zero Trust — is all about breach containment. It separates your network into smaller zones so that, if an intruder gains access to your network, they can’t spread through the network or, in other words, move laterally.

Let’s say an attacker breaches a segment of your network that houses non-customer data. With microsegmentation, attackers are contained to this entry point. This stops them from then moving through your network to other critical resources like your financial systems, customer data or employee records. Containment allows security teams to isolate threats and prevent them from escalating into full-blown crises.

For years, cybersecurity has focused on keeping attackers out. But what happens when they get in? Microsegmentation answers this critical question. You can contain the attack and continue operations as opposed to scrambling when the perimeter fails.  

The future of cybersecurity is resilience

As technology advances, so too will the threats against it. We’re entering a world where AI and machine learning will play increasingly critical roles in business operations, and with that comes new vulnerabilities. Attackers are using AI to craft more sophisticated attacks, and AI itself could be a target, leading to potential supply chain threats embedded within AI models.

But despite these new challenges, the fundamentals of resilience will remain the same: prevention and containment. Cyber resilience is the key to staying operational amid an ever-evolving threat landscape.  

As we face the future of cyber threats, resilience isn’t a luxury. It’s an operational necessity.

Contact us today to learn how Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation can help you build resilience today.