All organisations need to be able to successfully respond to and recover from cyber attacks. This relies on being prepared and drawing on a broad range of organisational capabilities including technical cyber incident response and recovery, IT incident management, IT disaster recovery, business continuity, crisis management and operational resilience.
This capability is increasingly important as:
- Cyber incidents and the crises they can trigger are increasingly complex, with malicious threat actors constantly evolving their tools and techniques to have as much impact as possible.
- Businesses are dependent on interconnected and interdependent IT, regulations are strict, and public expectation of transparency is high. Regulators require organisations to respond within specific set of hours or face significant fines.
- Operational resilience is a key regulatory requirement for many industries, with a particular focus on cyber security, as companies become more technology reliant.
- Bringing in an incident response provider in the middle of an incident without having a retainer in place can significantly delay response due to the time needed for onboarding.
In this environment, it is essential that organisations have well-documented, understood, and exercised plans and processes; ready to respond when a cyber incident or crisis occurs and to quickly recover. These should encompass the entire organisation – from technical first responders to functional teams, business units and strategic decision makers.