What is digital resilience? Definition, strategy and use cases

Why is digital resilience important?  

Digital resilience enables modern organizations to fight disruptions, recover quickly when they occur and adapt to changing threats. Moreover, adoptive businesses use digital resilience to recognize and pursue competitive advantages or evolving business needs. In fact, digital resilience boosts an organization in several key areas, including the following:

• Improved security. By assessing and evaluating disruption risks, a digitally resilient business invests strategically in technologies and processes designed to mitigate the most likely and severe threats. This often dramatically enhances security against known threats, including data breaches, and helps develop strong incident response and recovery practices.
• Data integrity. Digital resilience focuses on data quality issues, such as accuracy, completeness, integrity and availability. Digitally resilient organizations employ technologies and practices needed to protect data and ensure its quality, which is critical for systems such as business analytics, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI).
• Business continuity. Disruptions profoundly affect operations and revenue as well as stakeholder trust and organizational reputation. Digital resilience ensures business continuity (BC) by mitigating disruptions and, more importantly, maintaining vital services when incidents occur. BC is a central element of regulatory compliance in some industries and jurisdictions.
• Cost containment. Disruptions mean lost revenue, along with knock-on consequences such as troubleshooting, data recovery, system restoration and testing, among other incident management tasks. Digital resilience reduces costly downtime and reactive responses that create unnecessary expenditures of money and human resources.
• Competitive positioning. A digitally resilient organization becomes more competitive by sustaining operations and services during active incidents. Digital resilience builds trust with customers, employees and other stakeholders, improving the organization's reputation and brand. At the same time, digital resilience supports both analysis and adaptation, letting the business adapt to changing threats or emerging business needs, including opportunities to innovate infrastructure and practices.

Digital resilience vs. cyber resilience

Digital resilience and cyber resilience are related concepts that differ in scope.

Cyber resilience is a subset of digital resilience. Its focus is on an organization's ability to identify, protect against and recover from a broad array of cyberattacks. Cyber resilience primarily involves tasks such as incident response planning, data backup and recovery, vulnerability management, threat detection and mitigation and security training.

Digital resilience has a far wider scope of disruptions to tackle, including software bugs, hardware failures, cyberattacks, power outages and natural disasters. It also addresses other broader issues, including BC planning, disaster recovery (DR) planning, change management, data loss prevention (DLP) and risk management.

The following table compares the two concepts.

Key elements of a digital resilience strategy

A comprehensive digital resilience strategy requires careful consideration of four broad areas: cyber resilience, risk management, continuance planning and ongoing improvement. All four domains, working in tandem, craft a robust digital resilience strategy.

Cyber resilience

Cyber resilience focuses on the security aspects of the organization's digital environment. It typically includes the following elements:

• Strong and proactive security. A well-secured, carefully designed infrastructure features firewalls, network segmentation, intrusion detection and prevention, data encryption at rest and in flight, backup and recovery technologies, as well as endpoint protection platforms. A secure infrastructure also often adopts zero-trust methodologies for strong authentication and access control.
• Vulnerability assessments. Regular vulnerability assessments evaluate possible attack surfaces, identifying weaknesses such as unpatched operating systems or applications. Regular assessments target known and emerging threats and typically underpin mitigation strategies and operational policies designed to minimize threats.
• Incident response. Incident response provides a comprehensive approach to identifying, responding to and recovering from cybersecurity incidents. This approach includes monitoring, reporting and alerting tools; intrusion prevention mechanisms; DLP platforms; antimalware tools; recovery and testing practices; and post-mortem evaluations to guide future action.

Risk management

Risk management uses a wider lens to evaluate the organization's entire digital ecosystem. Risk management's broad range of actions includes the following:

• Risk assessment. Modern businesses face threats far broader than cybersecurity. A risk assessment evaluates a superset of potential threats and vulnerabilities. Common risks include a server failure, power outages, natural disasters and even insider threats. Regular risk assessments are the basis for business risk mitigation strategies and a resilient digital environment.
• Impact analysis. A risk assessment considers the likelihood and severity of each possible disruption, evaluating its impact on the business and critical operations. Once the impact analysis is complete, the business then prioritizes its risk mitigation investment to address the likeliest and most severe events, adjusting infrastructure and practices toward the strongest safeguards and quickest remediations.
• Third-party risks. Modern businesses are more reliant than ever on the services and support provided by third-party providers, such as public cloud and software as a service. Third parties, though, have access to sensitive data -- a direct risk to compliance and security. Risk management must include a careful evaluation of any third party's security and compliance posture.

Continuance planning

Business and technology leaders must consider how to recover when disruptions occur. These are some common elements of business continuity planning:

• Infrastructure redundancy. Systems fail; it's unavoidable. Mission-critical systems and infrastructure designed with varying levels of redundancy ensure that a fault in one element is seamlessly countered by redundant elements, such as a failover server or distributed computing. Redundancy, though costly, is often far less costly than disruption.
• Disaster recovery. Not all disruptions are due to cyberattacks. Earthquakes, floods, fires and acts of war or terrorism cause them, too, potentially damaging or destroying a local data center or disrupting network connectivity on a broad scale. DR planning considers these hypothetical disruptions and establishes recovery plans in case of an event.

• Data protection. Data is perhaps more valuable to a modern business than its IT infrastructure. This vital operational information includes consumer data, designs, plans and internet of things measurements. Data is the foundation for business analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence. Businesses invest heavily in these technologies, which restore everything from individual data files to entire critical systems.

Ongoing improvement

Assessments, along with lessons learned from actual disruptions, lay the groundwork for continuous improvement. By finding what doesn't work, the business makes changes to analyses, infrastructures and practices to ensure a more effective response to similar future disruptions. These improvements include the following:

• Testing and validation. Drills and simulated disruptions help the business validate its digital resilience strategies and find weaknesses -- or unintended consequences -- that require correction.
• Monitoring and alerting. Monitoring reveals system and application health and performance over time. Alerting brings quick attention to events and disruptions, such as system failure. Both activities require suitable tools and objective metrics for accurate comparisons.
• Employee training. Even a digitally resilient environment is threatened by the actions of a careless employee. Regular training educates employees about acceptable use, cybersecurity and other issues affecting digital resilience.

How to build a digital resilience strategy

Digital resilience is a multifaceted effort that combines people, processes, tools and technologies from across an organization. Of course, the path to digital resilience varies depending on specific needs and goals. Regardless of industry or business, a sound digital resilience strategy features these six principles.

1. Perform vulnerability assessments

Regular vulnerability assessments provide a deep dive into an organization's digital environment. Take a careful look at potential vulnerabilities inside and outside the business and consider the likelihood and severity of an incident. Some organizations deliberately attempt to simulate events that stress the people, processes and technologies managing operations. Discovered vulnerabilities produce a stronger and more resilient digital environment, while lessons learned improve future responses.

2. Watch for current threats

Once vulnerabilities are recognized, the organization next searches for threats or anomalies already present in the digital environment. As an example, run antimalware tools to look for viruses, and evaluate the reporting from intrusion detection and prevention platforms. Also, ensure the current software is updated and patched properly. Similarly, verify that the controls of third-party data partners are sufficient, and evaluate whether failover WAN connectivity is required to address internet disruptions. Monitoring platforms also help organize and contextualize real-time threat intelligence.

3. Evaluate the architecture

A well-developed architectural diagram of the current infrastructure highlights potential vulnerabilities. With this description, business leaders better understand how critical systems interact with each other. Subsequently, the business introduces design changes that prioritize digital resilience, such as a redundant server or distributed computing. Understanding how information flows, often referred to as static risk modeling, is often used to establish a baseline.

4. Establish a baseline

Advanced security and monitoring tools -- especially those employing ML and AI technologies -- rely on a baseline that establishes a known good, or normal, digital environment profile. This is sometimes called dynamic risk modeling. Baselines include typical network traffic patterns and server loads and form the foundation for anomaly detection. Anomalies are deviations from the norm and often the first indicator of a threat or an incident in progress. Alerts and automated responses typically originate from the baseline.

5. Risk mitigation planning

Risk mitigation involves people, processes and technologies both inside and outside the business. For example, tighter controls such as zero-trust security mitigate human risks, as do clear workflows and regular training. Process risks are addressed by clarifying, adjusting or updating problematic tasks. Technical risks are limited through cloud-based backup and recovery, an off-site approach. Risk mitigation planning is an ongoing process typically coupled with regular vulnerability assessments.

6. Monitoring and reporting

Controls and processes must be monitored. This task typically involves objective metrics relevant to the business, including the number of anomalies detected, attacks stopped or malware infections prevented. Monitoring ensures controls and processes are working properly. Declining results often indicate a changing or emerging threat that requires a response. Reporting ensures all stakeholders receive a realistic view of current digital resilience.

Digital resilience examples

Digital resilience is applicable to every enterprise, but specific business needs and industry expectations shape its necessary form. Still, there are several examples of digital resilience that have proven effective regardless of enterprise:

• Cloud computing adoption. Organizations turn to public cloud providers for resources and services, including databases, storage and backups, redundant computing and even cloud-native application deployment. Clouds offer considerable resilience against data loss and various disaster scenarios.
• Robust backup and recovery techniques. Data, an invaluable business asset, always requires protection. Robust backups guard data at the file or folder level and at the system image level. Because backups are available locally, remotely or in the cloud, businesses have the flexibility to tailor this powerful technique as needed.
• Redundant architectures. Mission-critical workloads, from databases to enterprise resource planning systems, are strengthened through redundant architectures, including distributed or redundant servers, along with RAID -- redundant array of independent disks -- or other fault-tolerant storage systems. Remember, the cost and complexity of redundancy are preferable to disruption and downtime.
• Remote work support. A digitally resilient business lets employees and partners access company data and workloads from almost anywhere while maintaining performance and security standards.
• Maintaining strong security. Digital resilience minimizes risks. Establishing zero-trust security or the principle of least privilege, robust role-based access control, comprehensive identity and access management, encryption and multifactor authentication all contribute to strong security.
• Rapid and effective incident response. Throughout detection, mitigation and recovery, digital resilience requires a quick, successful incident response. But first, these responses demand clear planning and processes along with regular testing. Also, worthwhile simulations ensure employees practice with and know the tools and actions needed to address any incident -- inside or outside the business.

Digital resilience tools and technologies

Given the multifaceted nature of digital resilience, countless tools and technologies exist to assist organizations. The following comprises a brief sampling:

• Advanced threat detection tools. An enhancement to anomaly detection tools, these use ML and AI to identify and mitigate complex cyberattacks.
• Anomaly detection and prevention tools. Designed to monitor system and network behaviors against established baselines, these tools alert administrators to any deviations indicating a possible incident or attack.
• Automation and orchestration tools. These automate complex business and IT workflows, limiting human error and speeding task execution and incident response.
• Backup and recovery tools. Protecting data from individual files, folders or even entire system images, these tools enable rapid and granular recovery scenarios.
• BC tools. These enable businesses to create and test plans to ensure vital business operations continue without interruption.
• Cloud migration and management tools. After helping businesses move data and workloads to the cloud, these tools also manage those assets for resilience and cloud scalability.
• Data management and governance tools. This technology protects and manages sensitive business data to ensure compliance, data quality and security throughout its retention.
• DR tools. These tools plan for recovering systems and services in the event of major disasters.
• Incident management tools. These powerful instruments track, manage and mitigate a broad range of events, from cyberattacks to system outages.
• Resilience assessment tools. Specifically created to help businesses identify vulnerabilities, these gauge the overall resilience of the organization.
• System health monitoring tools. These tools oversee the performance and availability of systems and services and alert administrators when potential issues arise.
• Vendor management tools. These tools assess and track the relationship and resilience of outside vendors and maintain security and normal operations during disruptions.