Operational resilience in a remote work world
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently said, “We have seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months.” This is a result of many organizations having to adapt to the new world of document sharing and video conferencing as they become distributed organizations overnight.
At Microsoft, we understand that while the current health crisis we face together has served as this forcing function, some organizations might not have been ready for this new world of remote work, financially or organizationally. Just last summer, a simple lightning strike caused the U.K.’s National Grid to suffer the biggest blackout in decades. It affected homes across the country, shut down traffic signals, and closed some of the busiest train stations in the middle of the Friday evening rush hour. Trains needed to be manually rebooted causing delays and disruptions. And, when malware shut down the cranes and security gates at Maersk shipping terminals, as well as most of the company’s IT network—from the booking site to systems handling cargo manifests, it took two months to rebuild all the software systems, and three months before all cargo in transit was tracked down—with recovery dependent on a single server having been accidentally offline during the attack due to the power being cut off.
Cybersecurity provides the underpinning to operationally resiliency as more organizations adapt to enabling secure remote work options, whether in the short or long term. And, whether natural or manmade, the difference between success or struggle to any type of disruption requires a strategic combination of planning, response, and recovery. To maintain cyber resilience, one should be regularly evaluating their risk threshold and an organization’s ability to operationally execute the processes through a combination of human efforts and technology products and services.
While my advice is often a three-pronged approach of turning on multi-factor authentication (MFA)—100 percent of your employees, 100 percent of the time—using Secure Score to increase an organization’s security posture and having a mature patching program that includes containment and isolation of devices that cannot be patched, we must also understand that not every organization’s cybersecurity team may be as mature as another.
Organizations must now be able to provide their people with the right resources so they are able to securely access data, from anywhere, 100 percent of the time. Every person with corporate network access, including full-time employees, consultants, and contractors, should be regularly trained to develop a cyber-resilient mindset. They shouldn’t just adhere to a set of IT security policies around identity-based access control, but they should also be alerting IT to suspicious events and infections as soon as possible to help minimize time to remediation.
Our new normal means that risks are no longer limited to commonly recognized sources such as cybercriminals, malware, or even targeted attacks. Moving to secure remote work environment, without a resilience plan in place that does not include cyber resilience increases an organization’s risk.
Before COVID, we knew that while a majority of firms have a disaster recovery plan on paper, nearly a quarter never test that, and only 42 percent of global executives are confident their organization could recover from a major cyber event without it affecting their business.
Operational resilience cannot be achieved without a true commitment to, and investment in, cyber resilience. We want to help empower every organization on the planet by continuing to share our learnings to help you reach the state where core operations and services won’t be disrupted by geopolitical or socioeconomic events, natural disasters, or even cyber events.
Learn more about our guidance related to COVID-19 here, and bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us at @MSFTSecurity for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.
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