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Why cybersecurity is now a key ingredient in business resilience

BrandPost By James Hayes
Apr 28, 20234 mins
Cloud SecurityCyberattacksCybercrime

As threats rise, businesses can only withstand cyber attacks with a security strategy that adopts the right technology and services – and breaks down silos.

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Credit: Getty

Successful businesses are increasingly realizing that the critical aims of growth and innovation must be coupled with a digital ecosystem that can cope with an ever-rising tide of cyber threats.

Enterprises must ensure security keeps pace with digital transformation by adopting a cyber resilience mindset that goes beyond solely threat detection.

Critical systems should be able to rapidly recover from attacks and other events such as natural disasters and geo-political uncertainty. Government survey results1 show that in 2022, 39% of UK businesses experienced a cyber incident, of which 21% identified a sophisticated attack type (e.g., malware, ransomware).

Responding to the inevitability of attack, boardrooms and C-suites should make cyber resilience a top priority that’s understood as key to business success. IDC defines cyber resilience programs as those focused on building an organization’s capacity to anticipate, withstand, and recover from adverse events.

Its PlanScape report, ‘IT Security – Building Enterprise Cyber-Resilience2, says: “The practice of resilience engineering has a long history in the world of life safety, transportation, and other disciplines where system resilience has long been a critical operational requirement.

“The increasing reliance of organizations on information and information systems to carry out crucial business functions now calls for these same principles to be applied to cybersystems.”

Determining a cyber resilience strategy is an organization-wide commitment that requires accountability from senior stakeholders – executives, IT leaders and business owners – says Sean Duffy, VP Cybersecurity GTM at NTT.

“Cybersecurity has become a fixture on executive agendas across all sectors,” Duffy reports. “Businesses have realized the criticality of a cyber resilient infrastructure in achieving business success.”

This realization has been bolstered by reassigning cyber accountability from the IT security function to the business function, Duffy adds, and is confirmation that security is first and foremost a business imperative: “Cyber risk and business risk are now inextricably linked.”

A benefit of this shift has been that executives have a deeper understanding of cyber exigencies, explains Brenden Bosch, Enterprise Security Architect at NTT.

“Since the changes wrought by COVID, boards and C-suites have become cyber savvy,” Bosch says. “This has enabled better alignment between business and security goals within organizations.”

To uphold resilience necessitates an IT culture shift3 from the tactical ‘Band-Aid’ point-solution approach to a comprehensive resilience strategy powered by people, modernized processes, and advanced tech across integrated teams, that proactively manages cyber threats in unison.

This is where a managed detection and response (MDR) service comes into its own.

Powered by automation and threat intelligence, services such as NTT’s MDR enables companies to strengthen internal teams, extend their security stack, and reduce the mean time to cyber attack counteraction.

In addition, NTT MDR includes cyber expertise on demand, adds Bosch: “NTT’s MDR clients have access to certified digital forensics and threat intelligence specialists, for example, who are available as required. With NTT MDR, the notion of a truly multidisciplinary response to cyber threats for enterprises of all sizes becomes a reality.”

The NTT MDR model goes beyond traditional managed services in that an organization’s in-house security teams are always in control but have the flexibility to pull in expert resources as the nature of cyber threats is revealed.

Moreover, with NTT’s MDR services4, companies gain visibility across their entire IT environment, so they can see and remediate each point of vulnerability – taking them further toward truly comprehensive business resilience.

Find out more about NTT Managed Detection and Response.

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[1] ‘Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2022’, Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport

[2] IDC PlanScape: ‘IT Security – Building Enterprise Cyber-Resilience’, January 2021 (IDC PlanScape – Doc # US47332020)

[3] ‘How to improve cybersecurity posture and overall cyber resilience’ – eBook by NTT and Microsoft

[4] 'Managed Detection & Response' – services page on NTT website