3 Ways Effective Data Management Supports Cyber Resilience

3 Ways Effective Data Management Supports Cyber Resilience 

Global organizations are having increasingly critical discussions around the importance of cyber resiliency, an organization’s ability to withstand, respond to, and recover from cyber incidents. With the frequency of cyberattacks growing 30% since last year and the total estimated fallout of cyber 2024 cyberattacks charted to surpass $9.5 trillion, ensuring effective cyber hygiene and resiliency strategies is more important than ever. 

The recent CrowdStrike outage, while not caused by a cyberattack, underscores the importance of having a resiliency plan enabling organizations to report and mitigate incidents before they impact customers—or impact revenue. According to cyber insurer Parametrix, 25% of Fortune 500 companies experienced a service disruption due to the outage and lost a combined $5.4 billion  (roughly $43.6 million each). 

There are countless tools and platforms available that can enhance cyber resilience, but effective data management is often overlooked. After all, you can’t protect your data if you don’t know where it is.  

Data management supports cyber resilience in three primary ways: 

1. Data integrity and accuracy 

The CrowdStrike incident highlights a crucial truth: it’s not a matter of if but when your organization will face a cyberattack or significant IT disruption. Considering this reality, it’s essential to establish fundamental data hygiene practices that guarantee the accuracy and integrity of your data. With these measures in place, you’ll be able to quickly locate and trust your data when an incident occurs, enabling you to effectively identify risks within your environment and implement appropriate responses. 

Effective data management practices also help prevent data corruption from attacks like ransomware, making it easier to recover reliable data after a cyber incident. 

1. Data protection and security 

Continuous monitoring and regular security audits are crucial to detect vulnerabilities and address potential threats promptly.  

As we covered in our book Innovation: Journey and Outcomes for the AIOps Revolution, in a world where data breaches and cyber threats are constant concerns, the ScienceLogic platform’s security features provide multifaceted defense mechanisms that continuously monitor to proactively detect vulnerabilities and automate remediation to ensure rapid recovery in the case of a breach. With ScienceLogic, you can: 

• Gain a comprehensive view of your organization’s security posture. This encompasses observability across hybrid IT and real-time monitoring of critical systems, networks, and applications as well as providing a service-oriented view to help quickly understand impact with context. 

• Proactively identify vulnerabilities, assess risks, and implement proactive measures. Our recently launched Skylar suite of AI tools in conjunction with our ScienceLogic platform helps proactively monitor data and operations to flag anomalies and identifying security incidents before they happen so that teams can preserve data security. 

• Analyze security data with precision. Advanced analytics and reporting tools allow you to make informed decisions and swiftly respond to emerging threats. 

1. Data availability and continuity 

A crucial part of any cyber resilience strategy is ensuring data availability and continuity. Regular backup and recovery procedures, along with data logs, analytics, and forensics, all play a key role in this process. 

Backup and recovery: Regular data backups and well-defined recovery procedures ensure data can be quickly restored during a cyberattack, minimizing downtime and data loss. For instance, a U.S.-based provider of SaaS applications that assists medical groups and health systems in managing patient intake sought to enhance network configuration processes for backup, recovery, and change management. Using ScienceLogic, the company can automate network and security device configuration backup, recovery, compliance analysis, and change management. This includes thorough network interrogation, close monitoring of configuration changes, and proactive protection of customer networks against disruptions, whether malicious or otherwise. 

Data logs, analytics, and forensics: In the event of a cyber incident or when critical business services are disrupted, metrics can alert you to the issue, but identifying the root cause has historically entailed a time-consuming search through log files – until now.  Skylar Automated Root Cause Analysis (RCA) does your heavy-lifting forensics. Skylar Automated RCA automates analysis by ingesting and running machine learning log analysis across millions or billions of messages from log files across your applications in real time. Skylar Automated RCA then provides you with a human-centric Generative AI summary of the source of the attack and remediation recommendations. 

Challenges loom large, but autonomic systems bring hope 

By integrating these elements, data management enhances your organization’s ability to withstand cyberattacks, maintain critical operations, and recover swiftly, thereby supporting overall cyber resilience. 

However, the ability to constantly monitor and manage all data cannot remain a human task. The continuing explosion of data and the increasing complexity of IT environments lead to burnout and limit innovation. This is especially true with the blurring of boundaries in telework, multi-cloud and hybrid environments, and the influx of personal devices in the enterprise. 

The fact is, the biggest challenge for achieving cyber resilience will be to move past the automation promised by the previous generation of AIOps tools and implement a more effective, autonomic system for monitoring and mitigation, where fixes are recommended as risks are identified.  

By leveraging effective, smart automation, teams can proactively identify and mitigate emerging threats, upholding security and freeing engineers to focus on business objectives and innovation. 

Learn more about Skylar Automated RCA here: https://sciencelogic.com/automated-root-cause-analysis