97 Things Every Information Security Professional Should Know

Chapter 4. InfoSec Professionals Need to Know Operational Resilience

Ann Johnson

Cyber breaches happen, and bad actors are becoming increasingly more sophisticated and persistent in their approaches with tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP). As organizations struggle to keep up with both the sophistication and volume of attacks by implementing new tools, processes, and human capabilities, one thing that often gets lost is the need to recover quickly from a cyber event and keep your critical business systems online to avoid further brand or financial loss.

There are steps an organization can take to make certain they are operationally resilient by ensuring they are cyber resilient. I am not going to focus on technology here, but rather process and people.

First, it is essential you identify, classify, and properly protect your critical business systems. One of the first things that organizations must do is properly identify where their critical business systems and business data sits, and put in place the proper controls around these systems and data.

Second, it is essential you have a plan, and you test that plan. Similar to an organization’s existing plan for any type of natural or human disaster, you must prepare and test a plan for a cyber disaster. And you must inform and transparently communicate with every employee, from executives to your most junior team members, ...