In order to survive and thrive, organizations need to be prepared. ‘Enterprise resilience’ refers to a business’s ability to withstand and adapt to challenges, even those that come by surprise. Instances like the coronavirus pandemic and the implementation of new regulations like the GDPR have demonstrated the importance of being able to adapt organizations on a large scale without interrupting essential operations, projects, and strategic programs.
‘Cyber resilience’ is becoming an increasingly essential element of enterprise resilience. The digital landscape is evolving more quickly than ever before. Potential issues like insider threats, SDN attacks, fraud, and zero-trust attacks demand vigilance and preparedness. This not only keeps organizations operational but also relates directly to factors such as compliance, value generation, and reputation. After all, if a business cannot protect its clients’ assets and information, it will quickly go elsewhere.
RESILIA is a cyber resilience framework and a trademark of AXELOS Limited. It works to improve cyber resilience by integrating systems, practices, and processes that deliver a higher level of protection. It also establishes a common language for cyber resilience and emphasizes the importance of upskilling individuals and teams in enabling resilient cyber strategies.
RESILIA Cyber Resilience not only helps businesses to prevent worst-case scenarios but also equips them to respond to security issues quickly and minimize any resulting damage. It sustains business continuity even in the face of major threats and has proven to be both relevant and popular with candidates across a range of roles.
How Does RESILIA Cyber Resilience Work?
The RESILIA syllabus takes a comprehensive approach to cyber resilience. It does not necessarily treat it as a specialist subject, but one that is relevant to, and impacted by, various elements of an average organization. RESILIA training looks at how elements of cybersecurity can be integrated into general business and operations management, as well as how it empowers enterprise resilience. It also covers risk management, as well as costs, benefits, and flexibility.
That being said, RESILIA’s focus is undoubtedly on cyber threats. That is to say, threats from cyberspace, rather than general problems or those relating to information security (though RESILIA certainly complements these areas, given the importance of cyber resilience to other parts of a business).
It aims to counter these threats with three control activities:
- Preventative – Avoid incidents that have the potential to jeopardize cyber resilience
- Detective – Identify the cause(s) of incidents
- Corrective – Respond to and recover from incidents
While RESILIA covers a full range of aspects of cyber resilience and offers a methodology for managing cybersecurity, it is not prescriptive. Instead, it emphasizes how the way organizations use specific controls depends on the risks they encounter and the environments in which they operate. This allows RESILIA practitioners to create proportionate cyber resilience measures. In other words, it is a generic and adaptable framework that can be applied widely.
As part of this, RESILIA is designed to avoid disrupting existing policies and frameworks. Instead, it complements them, and it even has links to popular examples such as ITIL 4 and Management of Risk (M_o_R). Its practices for cyber resilience strategy, design, transition, operation, and continual improvement can be adopted regardless of a business’s current approach.
The organizational focus of RESILIA is absolutely key. Practitioners look at boosting and optimizing cyber resilience throughout a business, and many organizations will invest in basic RESILIA training for teams outside of IT. RESILIA also works to establish new management processes so that individuals and teams feel empowered to support cyber resilience as part of an ongoing process.
How Can RESILIA Cyber Resilience Certification Help My Business?
RESILIA can have a positive impact throughout a business. Its target audience includes IT, security, service management, and compliance professionals, though HR, finance, procurement, operations, and marketing teams and departments can also benefit from studying the syllabus firsthand. The better-able teams and departments are to integrate cyber resilience into their daily practices and projects, and more protection the business will enjoy.
Some of the major benefits of RESILIA Cyber Resilience include:
- Increasing the safety of important assets
- Reducing the capacity for human error in cybersecurity
- Reducing the likelihood and occurrence of major disasters
- Reducing the impact and cost of cyber attacks
- Boosting the reputation of practitioner organizations
- Improving compliance practices
- Improving culture and morale as teams feel empowered to integrate resilience into their daily tasks and strategic thinking
- Guaranteeing protection for partners, vendors, resellers, contractors, and clients
- Updating the skills and knowledge of IT teams, enabling them to take a hands-on approach and respond to threats more quickly
- Making sure change and transformation programs take cybersecurity into account throughout
It is worth remembering that with the digital sphere now having a direct connection to core business functions, projects, and programs, the strength of cyber resilience strategies now directly correlates with organizational survival. RESILIA practitioners are specialists at developing risk and disaster recovery plans for worst-case scenarios while also integrating processes that prevent them from occurring.
