The Key to Cyber Resilience: Identifying Critical Business Functions
Updated: July 9, 2024
Originally Published: September 26, 2023
In today's digital landscape, businesses face an ever-increasing threat from cyberattacks. To effectively protect themselves, organizations must bolster their cyber resilience. One key strategy is identifying critical business functions and their associated IT assets. (Also referred to as ‘critical services’ by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Cyber Resilience Review (CRR).) By understanding which aspects of your operations are most vital, you can prioritize your resources and efforts to strengthen your security measures.
Understanding cyber resilience
Legacy cybersecurity systems primarily focus on preventing and defending against cyber threats. Cyber resilience acknowledges that, despite your best efforts to prevent attacks, organizations will still be targeted, and incidents will occur. Therefore, it emphasizes the importance of maintaining business continuity and minimizing the impact.
Cyber resilience requires a proactive and holistic approach encompassing people, processes, and technology. It is not just about having solid firewalls and antivirus software but a comprehensive strategy that considers the entire business ecosystem. It involves not only preventing attacks but also minimizing the impact and recovering quickly when an attack does occur.
Why is identifying critical business functions important?
Identifying critical business functions is crucial for building cyber resilience. These functions are the core activities that keep your organization running smoothly and generating revenue. Understanding which functions are critical allows you to focus your resources and efforts on protecting these areas. By prioritizing security measures, your organization can ensure its most vital operations are well-defended against cyber threats.
Identifying critical business functions also helps your organization allocate resources effectively. Cybersecurity measures can be costly, and it is not feasible or necessary to protect every aspect of a business equally. By identifying critical functions, your organization can invest its resources where they matter the most, maximizing your cybersecurity budget while minimizing potential risks.
Additionally, identifying critical business functions allows you to develop more effective contingency plans in the event of a cyberattack or other disruption. By understanding a function’s asset dependencies you can create backup systems and alternative processes. This proactive approach helps your organization recover quickly and limit the impact of cyber incidents.
How to identify critical business functions
The process of identifying critical business functions involves a thorough examination of an organization's operations and dependencies. It requires collaboration between departments and stakeholders to understand the business's structure and processes.
1 Create a list of business functions
The first step is to create a list of all the functions and processes within the organization. This list should include all internal and external activities that contribute to the overall functioning of the business. It is essential to consider all aspects, including customer-facing operations, supply chain management, financial processes, and communication channels.
Critical business functions can vary depending on your organization and your industry.
In a manufacturing company, critical business functions may include production processes, supply chain management, and quality control.
In a financial institution, critical functions may include transaction processing, risk management, and regulatory compliance.
In a healthcare organization, critical functions may include patient care, emergency response, and data security.
2 Prioritize functions and processes
Once the list is complete, the next step is prioritizing the functions based on their criticality. This can be done through a risk assessment process that evaluates the potential impact on the organization of an outage of a given function. Factors such as financial loss, reputational damage, regulatory compliance, and customer trust should be considered when determining a function's criticality.
3 Create an asset inventory
Every critical business function relies on a set of assets to provide that service to the organization, including endpoints, servers, cloud software, and more. Knowing which assets are necessary to provide critical functions is important when creating a cyber resilience plan.
Legacy asset inventory solutions rely on compiling lists of existing assets that you already know about. They pull data from your CMDB, cloud management platforms, and patch management systems, along with spreadsheets from purchasing or other data sources. What they do well is show you an aggregate list of everything you already know about. What they don’t do well is show you what you don’t know about.
Asset discovery is the process of identifying and cataloging all assets within an organization's environment. It scans the network and uses specialized tools to identify and document assets accurately. Asset discovery is a necessary capability of a modern asset inventory solution. This is important because not every asset inventory solution includes asset discovery, much less automated asset discovery.
4 Document results
The final step is to document and communicate the identified critical business functions and their associated assets with your organization. This ensures that all stakeholders can align their efforts accordingly. It also helps you develop incident response plans and allocate resources effectively.
Assess the impact of cyberattacks on critical business functions
Understanding the potential impact of cyberattacks on critical business functions is essential for you to develop effective cyber resilience measures. This assessment helps you prioritize your security efforts and allocate resources accordingly.
One approach to assessing the impact is through a business impact analysis (BIA). A BIA evaluates a cyberattack's potential financial, operational, and reputational consequences on critical functions. It helps your organization quantify the potential losses and prioritize your mitigation efforts.
Another important aspect of assessing the impact is understanding the interdependencies between different functions. Often an attack on one function can have a cascade of effects on other business areas. By mapping out these dependencies, organizations can identify potential vulnerabilities and develop strategies to minimize the impact of such attacks.
Risk assessments are also a valuable tool for assessing the impact of cyberattacks. These assessments identify potential threats and vulnerabilities, allowing your organization to prioritize security measures and allocate resources effectively. Your asset inventory enables you to identify sources of risk, such as single points of failure, policy violations, shadow IT, and more. By considering internal and external risks, your organization can comprehensively understand the potential impact and develop targeted strategies to mitigate these risks.
Implement cyber resilience measures
Once critical business functions and their potential vulnerabilities have been identified, your organization can implement cyber resilience measures to strengthen its security posture. These measures should be comprehensive, encompassing technical and non-technical aspects of cybersecurity.
Technical measures include implementing a zero trust architecture, robust firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and encryption protocols. These technologies help protect critical assets and prevent unauthorized access. Regular security updates and patches should also be applied to protect systems against known vulnerabilities.
Non-technical measures focus on the people and processes within the organization. This includes training employees on cybersecurity best practices and developing incident response plans. Regular security audits and assessments should also be conducted to identify any gaps or weaknesses in the security infrastructure.
It is important to remember that cyber resilience is an ongoing process. As technology evolves and cyber threats become more sophisticated, organizations must continuously update and adapt their resilience measures. Regular testing and evaluation of security measures are also essential to ensure their effectiveness and identify any areas for improvement.
Continuously monitor for changes
Organizations generally aren’t designed, they grow organically as your IT staff adds capabilities as needed. Enterprise environments also change drastically month by month as new assets are integrated into the infrastructure and old assets are phased out. Your asset inventory solution should continuously monitor these changes to ensure that decision-makers have access to the most up-to-date information, facilitating informed and timely decision-making.
Conclusion
In today’s digital landscape, businesses face an ever-increasing threat from cyberattacks, making robust cyber resilience essential. Identifying critical business functions and their associated assets is a key strategy to bolster this resilience. By understanding which aspects of your operations are most vital, you can prioritize resources and efforts to strengthen security measures effectively. Implementing a comprehensive and proactive cyber resilience strategy, which includes regular monitoring and updates, ensures that your organization can withstand and quickly recover from cyber incidents, maintaining business continuity and minimizing impact. By embracing cyber resilience, your organization can confidently navigate the digital landscape and safeguard its future success in the face of ever-evolving cyber threats.
A more effective approach
The journey toward cyber resilience is filled with challenges. Lack of visibility into sprawling infrastructures combined with the lack of knowledge of how it aligns with core business operations poses a significant hurdle, especially as organizations evolve and expand.
Redjack addresses this critical need by revolutionizing asset inventory through a business function lens, enabling a deeper understanding of how your infrastructure is interconnected. By deploying sensors across your environment and compiling asset lists correlated with critical business functions, Redjack ensures alignment with organizational priorities.
With ongoing monitoring and evidence-based insights, Redjack empowers organizations to identify points of failure, make strategic decisions grounded in solid evidence, and confidently create disaster recovery plans and test them. Ultimately, Redjack transforms organizations from a state of uncertainty to one of resilience, equipping them to restore critical business functions seamlessly in the face of adversity.
Contact us to discover how Redjack has helped large organizations achieve genuine cyber resilience.
