Business continuity and cyber security are both critical aspects of managing risk and protecting organizations in the modern digital landscape. While they have some overlaps, business continuity and cybersecurity are distinct practices with different primary goals. Cybersecurity aims to protect digital assets and infrastructure from cyber threats like hacking, malware, and data breaches. Business continuity focuses more broadly on maintaining operations during any type of disruption, including cyber incidents as well as natural disasters, supply chain interruptions, and other crises.
Despite their differences, business continuity and cybersecurity are closely intertwined in many ways. Cyber incidents can severely disrupt operations, so effective business continuity planning must account for cyber risks. And robust cybersecurity measures make it less likely that operations will be impacted by cyber events. Understanding the relationship between business continuity and cybersecurity is important for organizations seeking to manage risk and build resilience.
What is business continuity?
Business continuity refers to the strategies and plans organizations put in place to ensure they can continue operating through disruptive events. The primary goals of business continuity programs are to:
– Minimize interruptions to operations and services
– Protect people and assets
– Maintain critical functions and revenue streams
– Recover quickly and resume normal operations as soon as possible
To achieve these goals, business continuity planning involves conducting a business impact analysis to identify time-sensitive operations, recovery time objectives, and appropriate strategies for continuity and recovery. Key activities typically include:
– Developing contingency plans for maintaining critical processes during disruptions
– Ensuring availability of key personnel
– Backing up vital information/data
– Arranging for alternative facilities, equipment, and supply chains if needed
– Training employees for continuity and disaster scenarios
– Testing and rehearsing business continuity protocols
Robust business continuity management makes organizations more resilient to any type of disruption by preparing them to respond effectively and safeguard critical business functions.
What is cybersecurity?
Cybersecurity refers to the practices, controls, and technologies organizations employ to protect their computer systems, servers, networks, devices, data, applications, and other digital assets from cyberattacks and vulnerabilities. Key goals of cybersecurity include:
– Protecting systems and data from unauthorized access or alteration
– Detecting, responding to, and containing cyber threats
– Maintaining the integrity and availability of networks and data
– Minimizing disruptions to normal operations
– Reducing risks to the organization, customers, and partners
Some core cybersecurity activities include:
– Implementing security controls like firewalls, antivirus software, and encryption
– Developing cyber incident response plans
– Training staff on security best practices and threat detection/reporting
– Conducting vulnerability assessments, penetration testing, and risk audits
– Monitoring networks and systems for anomalies and threats
– Controlling access to systems and data via authentication and authorization
– Backing up and securing critical data
– Ensuring third-party security for vendors, suppliers, etc.
Effective cybersecurity reduces the likelihood and impact of cyberattacks that could impede operations, cause data loss, or otherwise harm the organization. It is a key element of managing cyber risk.
The relationship between business continuity and cybersecurity
While their areas of focus differ, business continuity and cybersecurity work synergistically to bolster an organization’s resilience. Their key links include:
Cyber threats are a business continuity risk
Any business continuity plan must consider risks that could cause disruptions. In today’s technology-dependent business environment, cyber incidents represent a significant threat to operations. Attacks like malware, phishing, ransomware, and network intrusions can negatively impact systems and cripple productivity. Massive attacks can even take entire businesses offline.
Without accounting for cyber risk, business continuity plans will be incomplete and less effective. Organizations can build more robust continuity plans by identifying critical systems at risk, estimating potential downtime and losses from various cyber incidents, and developing contingencies like shifting to backup systems or alternate worksites if primary networks are compromised.
Treating cyber threats as continuity risks allows appropriate preparation and response plans to be incorporated into the overall business continuity program.
Effective cybersecurity reduces business disruptions
Mitigating cyber risk through strong day-to-day security controls and defenses makes major operational disruptions less likely. Reliable cybersecurity measures like keeping software patched and updated, monitoring for intrusions, controlling access, encrypting sensitive data, and training employees on cyber hygiene best practices all help prevent successful attacks that could impede business activities.
When cyber incidents do occur, maturing an organization’s detection and response capabilities can help isolate and resolve issues faster before they spread and cause prolonged outages. The more cyber risk is reduced via robust cybersecurity, the less likely business continuity plans will need to be activated. Cybersecurity and business continuity professionals should collaborate to align cybersecurity efforts with operational resilience goals.
Continuity planning for inevitable cyber incidents
While strong cybersecurity is invaluable, realistically organizations cannot reduce their cyber risk to zero. Advanced threat actors using sophisticated techniques often circumvent even robust defenses. Continuity planning should still prepare for inevitable incidents by assessing the feasibility of maintaining critical operations if key systems are disabled by an attack.
Continuity professionals should collaborate with cybersecurity teams to understand possible breach scenarios and their operational impacts. Cyber drills simulating ransomware, denial-of-service attacks or other incidents can help test and refine continuity plans. Clear protocols for decision making, communications, and coordinating response efforts across functions should be established before an actual cyber crisis.
With the likelihood of some cyber incidents high even for protected organizations, integrating continuity preparations more tightly with the cybersecurity function helps provide contingency options should cyber threats evade security controls and cause outages.
Cyber resilience requires continuity-focused recovery
Recovering from major cyber events requires organizations to leverage their business continuity capabilities in close alignment with security response efforts. Cybersecurity teams lead efforts to contain the technical damage from an attack, while business continuity teams convene resources needed to resume impacted operations per established recovery plans.
Continuity staff can declare a cyber crisis, activate contingency protocols, arrange alternative facilities/worksites, provide cyber incident communications, document cyber recovery costs, and take other steps outlined in continuity plans to get business activities up and running again. They can also initiate longer-term cyber resilience improvements identified as part of post-incident reviews.
With technical and business issues often deeply intertwined during cyber incidents, close cross-functional collaboration between cybersecurity and business continuity professionals through the preparation, response, recovery and review processes leads to more cyber-resilient outcomes overall.
Best practices for aligning business continuity and cybersecurity
Some best practices for effectively integrating business continuity and cybersecurity include:
Jointly conduct business impact analysis and risk assessments
Continuity planning begins with a business impact analysis (BIA) to evaluate operational processes, data/systems criticality, and acceptable downtime limits. Cybersecurity programs also conduct extensive risk assessments for priorities like identifying high-value data and systems to protect.
Collaborating on assessing cyber risks and their potential business impacts ensures continuity plans and security controls are calibrated around a shared understanding of operational mission priorities, vulnerabilities, and risk tolerances.
Model cyber incident scenarios in continuity exercises
Effective continuity plans must be regularly tested and updated to perform when really needed. Exercises providing realistic simulations of various cyberattacks and their business impacts are invaluable for validating and improving continuity protocols for cyber incidents.
Such dry runs help clarify roles and responsibilities, expose planning gaps, and embed organizational readiness to manage cyber crises without shutting down entirely. Lessons absorbed during collaborative testing strengthen resilience when actual response and recovery is required.
Align technical capabilities for resilience
On the technical side, continuity planners should advocate for cybersecurity solutions purpose-built to support resilience versus just blocking threats. Capabilities like network segmentation, air-gapped backups, and systems designed for graceful degradation allow some operational availability even during significant cyber events.
Promoting cybersecurity investments that maintain flexibility and options for business continuity professionals if primary systems are compromised leads to better overall cyber-business resilience.
Bridge communication and culture gaps
Effective collaboration between technical cybersecurity staff and business/operations focused continuity teams depends on strong mutual understanding. Cross-training, job shadowing, and participating together in contingency exercises can help close communication and culture gaps.
Integrating continuity and cybersecurity professionals into joint crisis management teams and processes is also key for managing coordinated incident response and recovery efforts. Breaking down silos leads to more unified cyber resilience strategies.
Provide unified leadership and oversight
Real organizational alignment of business continuity and cybersecurity requires management support and oversight. Leaders must ensure coordinated strategies, shared metrics and accountability between functions, adequate resourcing, and ongoing senior-level commitment to maturing integrated continuity and security capabilities.
Unified leadership and governance of resilience programs and investments maximizes positive impacts on mitigating cyber-related business disruptions. Continuity and cybersecurity professionals have joint stewardship of organizational risk.
Conclusion
While their focus areas differ, business continuity and cybersecurity are fundamentally linked when it comes to managing operational risk and resilience. Continuity planning provides contingency options when cyber defenses fall short. Effective cybersecurity reduces the likelihood of disruptive cyber events needing continuity activation. Aligning them to work synergistically improves outcomes and cyber resilience.
With cyber threats only intensifying, integrating business continuity and cybersecurity via joint planning, testing, communications, training, leadership and capability investment is imperative for organizations striving to become more cyber resilient. Though specifics of integration must align with organizational culture and resources, the future demands greater convergence of continuity and cybersecurity so that business operations remain protected yet flexible in navigating the turbulence of our digital world.