Cyber Resilience

Cyber resilience has become the new phenomenon. It has featured in presidential executive orders and policy directives to national and international private initiatives.

The four aspects of cyber resilience are – (1) prepare, (2) withstand, (3) recover, and (4) adapt.  While these other aspects are notable in their own rights, and provide foundational underpinnings for cyber resilience, however, effective cyber resilience must address fundamental issues of recovery.

It is pertinent to note that no matter how secure cyberspace may appear, cyber incident is totally unavoidable. This is true not just to cyber systems and infrastructures but across the physical, information, cognitive and social domains alike

Why the Cyber Recovery Operational Framework?

Did you know that currently there are no operational guides for operationalising cyber recovery that organisations can use today to exercise their cyber recovery in the event of an incident? This is why we developed this framework to help organisation prepare and handle cyber recovery. This reliable operational guide is to help organisations, institutions, and agencies to recover, and restore services and operations in the event of a cyber incident.

According to the NIST’s special publication 800-184 (page vi), “Although there are existing federal policies, standards, and guidelines on cyber event handling, none of them focuses solely on improving cybersecurity recovery capabilities, and the fundamental information is not captured in a single document. The previous recovery content tends to be spread out in documents such as security, contingency, disaster recovery, and business continuity plans”. This is precisely the rationale for our contribution to developing this framework.

What is Cyber Recovery Operational Framework?

Cyber Recovery Operational Framework is an operative. It comprises eight (8) core components and forty-one (41) subcomponents that allow organisations perform cyber recovery in the event of a cyber incident. Organisations can choose to either reuse or adapt the framework to create their own cyber recovery operative.

The cyber recovery operational framework has been developed based on several guidance, frameworks, and standards e.g. NIST CSF, ISO and NIST SPs.