Advancing in digitalisation without considering business continuity and disaster recovery as a vital step will hinder transformation efforts. To help address this, industrial cybersecurity specialist SolutionsPT shares 5 best practices for cyber resilience.
As we start another year, cybersecurity should be at the forefront of digital transformation plans, and for good reason. Statistics released in 2024[1] show a global increase of 25.7% in cyberattacks for manufacturing alone. The National Cyber Security Centre 2024 Annual Review[2] states that the threat to the UK’s critical water, wastewater and energy infrastructure is ‘enduring and significant’.
These statistics prove the importance of prioritising cyber resilience across the broad spectrum of industrial sectors and strengthening defences alongside digitalisation progress to best maintain business continuity.
Where traditional cybersecurity primarily looks to prevent breaches, cyber resilience maintains core operations even during an active cyber-attack.
Data visibility = cyber resilience
Best practice for disaster recover involves putting a plan in place covering digital capabilities and data visibility. This plan will support consistent operations for industrial businesses of any size:
- Risk assessment
While not new to industrial enterprises, risk assessments must be consistent and always evolving to meet new cyber threats. New vulnerabilities are found every day so repeating the same risk assessment won’t alert these to operators. Robust risk assessments must adapt to the constantly changing threat landscape, requiring active research from a dedicated team.
- Asset Identification
Understanding your most critical asset and their security posture is key to establishing the effort and controls that are necessary to provide cyber resilience. With the abundance of legacy assets, now in a highly connected world, makes defending these a challenging if not impossible task. Where protection is not possible or feasible, redundancy, isolation and recovery become more important than protection.
- Redundancy and Segregation
Availability drives automation, protecting systems through segregation creates isolations zones between processes, allowing them to continue when others around them have been compromised. Critical systems should have built in redundancy at the hardware and software level to deliver availability during period of maintenance and unplanned downtime.
- Automated threat detection and backups
Regular backups and redundant systems ensure critical data is not lost and can be quickly restored. These should already be part of any cybersecurity strategy. Adding advanced and automated threat detection will flag irregularities and send alerts to operators. Digital transformation uses data-driven insights to empower operators to make informed decisions, and a cyber resilience strategy must work the same way.
- Skills/training
As cyber threats are always evolving, operators need the skills and knowledge to address them. Simultaneously, there is a growing skills gap within industry that includes those fundamental cyber skills. Simple check box training exercise covering the basics of cyber security during employee onboarding will no longer suffice. Like all digital transformation capabilities, businesses that want to ensure cyber resilience should commit to continuous learning or seek a partner organisation with dedicated expertise to share the responsibility.
Each of these five best practices will prepare industrial businesses against cyber threats but rely on complete data visibility. Data visibility means that risk assessment, high availability, threat detection, and most importantly response is based on real-time information, only then can issues be solved before they escalate.
Cyber resilience should be the lead focus for cybersecurity efforts in 2025. With attacks increasing across all industrial sectors and of all sizes, all businesses are at risk. Cyber resilience ensures that even when an attack occurs, core operations can remain safe and stable while recovery is swift. One way to do this is choosing a complete industrial cybersecurity partner such as SolutionsPT that removes the complexity and fortifies operations in today’s industrial landscape.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1315805/cyber-attacks-top-industries-worldwide/
[2] https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/pdfs/news/ncsc-warns-enduring-significant-threat-to-uks-critical-infrastructure.pdf
