The IT ecosystem never stops changing. Three trends in particular are driving CTOs, CIOs and CISOs to work toward IT resilience in their organizations:
Building IT resilience is important because of accelerating shifts in the threat landscape.
Traditionally, hackers have gone after data that held nearly immediate value for them, such as credit card numbers, personal details and bank account information. But in the era of ransomware, hackers go after data that has value to you: your Tier 0 assets, your contracts, your SharePoints, your OneDrives, your email, your corporate systems. Data skyrockets in value when it’s suddenly unavailable to you, even if it’s of little value outside of your company.
Nearly every organization is impacted by shifts like those in the threat landscape. With stakes that high, it’s no wonder that 74 percent of businesses report they are not cyber-resilient.
In companies dependent on Active Directory — the mission-critical backbone of infrastructure — fast, secure recovery following a cyberattack is the essence of IT resilience. More than seven out of 10 companies are unable to tolerate even two hours of downtime for critical applications, so speedy recovery of AD is of the essence. IT resilience includes automated protection and recovery to reduce the risk of human error and the need to start over. It also applies to keeping AD backups out of the reach of attackers and infection by malware.
IT resilience extends from the first line of defense, like email attachments and phishing sites, to the last line of defense: the backups of your applications and data companywide. That means not only having solid backup/recovery software and procedures in place but also ensuring that backed-up data is immutable and useless to attackers.
The benefits of IT resilience are that you can go beyond keeping up with the changing threat landscape — you can stay a step ahead of it. By automating the work of resilience, you can more quickly reap its benefits: higher availability, secure infrastructure and better performance of IT assets.
An IT resilience strategy hardens cybersecurity across every facet of your entire IT ecosystem, building security from the inside out.
One of the first steps in building your IT resilience plan is to develop a Zero Trust strategy. Zero Trust takes a cloud-first, identity-centric approach to protecting the people, applications and data essential to your business. It guards against threats by continually verifying access permissions (human and machine) to all requested resources (on-prem, cloud and hybrid) and comparing user actions to baseline behavior analytics.
In Zero Trust, you remove vulnerable permissions and access rights that users no longer need. Instead, you base your decisions about access on specific delegation and proper provisioning with fine granularity. You replace the sharing of admin passwords with individual and dynamic authentication for every administrative action. You follow the principle of least privilege by granting only the permissions that administrators require to do their job – no more and no less.
Zero Trust picks up where the network-centric approach leaves off. In the network-centric approach, you ask, “Are you authorized to be on this network or not?” once at login. In the new landscape, with so much more at stake, Zero Trust lets you ask, “Do you have permission to access that file/application/device/resource?” continually. The result is a vast improvement in your security posture.
An IT resilience plan ensures that your IT operations are streamlined and scalable to adapt to the fast-changing usage patterns of your customers and users. Save time and minimize security risks by automating administration tasks like user and group management, Group Policy management, Active Directory health monitoring, disaster recovery planning and Office 365 backup.
Along with hardening cybersecurity, a robust IT resilience plan covers data protection and disaster recovery. This step usually comprises at least three elements — formalizing scope, performing a business impact analysis to establish requirements, and creating detailed recovery procedures — but it is often overlooked. Even in companies that self-assess their recovery capabilities as meeting or exceeding the expectations of the CIO, only 27 percent have all three of those elements in place.