Data breaches, phishing attacks, and the increasing threat of cybercrime are recurrent news headlines. The lesson to learn from these events is clear: Every organization is at some level of risk. To protect your business from a data breach, consider the role of strengthened cyber resilience in your security strategy and how cloud security services can help.
What is cyber resilience?
The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) defines cyber resiliency as the ability to anticipate, withstand, recover from, and adapt to adverse conditions, stresses, attacks, or compromises on systems that use or are enabled by cyber resources. More simply, cyber resilience refers to an organization’s ability to conduct day-to-day operations without incurring a breach or major disruption.
Assessing your cybersecurity strengths and weaknesses
As cyber crime incidents grow in frequency, they’re also becoming more sophisticated. Ransomware attacks alone occur every 11 seconds. You can begin evaluating your cybersecurity strategy’s strengths and weaknesses by asking the following questions:
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Where are we the most vulnerable or have not assessed our risk?
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What assurance have our vendors provided to convey what they are doing to secure their software?
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How does the security of our on-premises facilities compare to what we could achieve in the cloud?
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Are we implementing zero trust strategies, advanced authentication, and compartmentalization?
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Are employees adequately trained on phishing attacks?
Security is about your customers too
Protecting sensitive and personal data is also an important component of building trust with your customers. Research from Ponemon suggests that personally identifiable information (PII) is the most common and expensive type of data breach. In their study of over 537 breaches spanning 17 countries and industries, nearly half involved the exposure of customers’ PII.
As the amount of data continues to grow exponentially, human error that can lead to data breaches has increased potential. Automation of cloud provisioning and configuration, encryption, patching and updating, scaling, and performance tuning addresses that challenge head-on. Automation not only helps reduce the security risks of manual processes but also saves time and labor managing enterprise-scale growth of data.
Both public and private sector organizations are using the cloud to improve cyber resilience. Cybersecurity leader Tanium uses Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to gain built-in security, high availability, and proven price-performance at the network edge, making their endpoint management and security products more accessible to midsize companies. The city and county of San Francisco modernized their access management application stack with Oracle Identity and Access Management (IAM) by building a centralized and highly available portal for critical applications, helping keep sensitive data secure and improving the customer experience.
At Oracle, our Advertising and Customer Experience (ACX) team uses Oracle Cloud Guard to identify security risks and establish best practices for detection and response. Automated threat monitoring, detections, and responses with manual reviews and controls help the ACX team improve security posture, gain visibility across their entire OCI estate, proactively detect and respond to potential threats, and identify misconfigurations caused by human or system errors.
How can the cloud help with cybersecurity?
Even with the increasing sophistication and frequency of cyberattacks, organizations can take steps to protect their businesses. Cloud service providers (CSPs) can offer benefits to organizations looking to improve cyber resilience without increasing costs. CSPs can invest in security at a scale beyond what most individual organizations can, resulting in more advanced security services backed with a depth of expertise for cloud customers.
“I’ve had the opportunity to meet with various other technology leaders and hear their thoughts and insights on protecting their customers and their own environments from cyber threats,” said Jae Evans, CIO at Oracle. “We all agree on the importance of security and maintaining the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data and services to our employees, partners, consumers, and customers.”
The cloud can provide deeper visibility into security and improve defenses. Data collection and analysis, made possible by the cloud, can help improve an organization’s ability to monitor activity and evaluate risks. This capability better equips your IT staff to predict, prepare, and respond to attacks, which strengthen your security posture and improves cyber resilience.
Another benefit of cloud security is automation. By aggregating workloads in the cloud, you can take advantage of automation to reduce human error, protect sensitive and regulated data, patch databases for security vulnerabilities, and prevent unauthorized access automatically.
Lastly, organizations who use cloud security services to improve cyber resilience benefit from continuous innovation that leads to new features and best-in-class tech. For example, Oracle recently released Oracle Threat Intelligence Service, which provides advanced, actionable threat intelligence integrated with Oracle Cloud Guard and Oracle Cloud Guard Threat Detector to help protect critical resources in OCI.
Strengthen cyber resilience with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
Oracle offers cloud security services that help organizations reduce risk and protect cloud workloads. Get started today with Oracle Cloud Free Tier.
Read the brief: 5 considerations for establishing cyber resiliency.