The right cybersecurity policies put comprehensive protections in place for a company’s valuable assets before, during and after an event or attempted event may take place. Take a closer examine best practices pertaining to each step of the continuum.
- Before An Event: Build a robust asset inventory of both information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) assets. With deeper understanding of both connected and disconnected assets, you can more readily characterize security risk within your environment. An added benefit to this step is an updated asset inventory. This can be used to help you minimize lifecycle risk by storing an appropriate amount of spares onsite, staying ahead of end-of-life dates, and proactively maintaining your critical assets.
- During An Event: The ability to detect when an event is taking place requires a level of visibility into your operations that, until recently, was hard if not impossible to achieve. Various security technologies and controls can provide continuous monitoring and detection for increased visibility into normal day-to-day operations. Any event that deviates would signal an alert. Deploying the cybersecurity toolsets appropriate for your needs provides a higher level of operations visibility, with the added benefit of establishing a baseline for “normal” operations. This visibility is provided by alerts when anomalous events, such as an incorrect maintenance task, are taking place.
- After An Event: With correct response and recovery programs in place, such as backup and disaster recovery procedures for applications and data, organizations can become programmatic about responding to anomalous events. If the appropriate policies and procedures are put in place to respond effectively to a cybersecurity event, operations are able to return to normal production more quickly afterward.
The bottom line for decision-makers is: the journey to secure connections first requires an understanding of whether your current cybersecurity capabilities adequately helps protect your operations from the many threats that exist. Your cybersecurity systems should provide comprehensive support before, during and after an event, detecting when an event is taking place, sending alerts immediately, and effectively responding.
It may be worth the investment in peace of mind alone, but can translate to cost savings in real ways. The ability to recover quickly from cyber events, whether malicious or incidental, with appropriate response/recovery procedures and technology in place can translate directly into reduced downtime, resulting in greater productivity. For example, the ability to restore an application because back-ups and procedures were already in place minimizes timely activities to manually restore the application.
Finding operational value in cybersecurity initiatives is not hard to do – and there are plenty of ways to be proactive about your cybersecurity. As we’ve learned, the true value of comprehensive cybersecurity is not only in the continuum of protection provided for systems and equipment, but also in the reduction and prevention of costly downtime.
