Cyber Resilience vs. Cyber Security: What's the Difference?

Because data is one of the most valuable assets a business can have, it’s almost impossible to overstate the importance of protecting it. Since the beginning of the computing age, protecting information from unauthorized users has been a top priority.  

The internet and the cloud have only complicated cyber security, thus making it more critical than ever. The modern threat landscape is constantly evolving, and malicious actors are continually finding ways to overcome even the most stringent security features and protocols.  

Ransomware attacks, for example, continue their upward trajectory. In 2023, 72% of businesses worldwide were hit by ransomware attacks and those organizations paid more than $1 billion in ransoms to their attackers. This year, so far, is gearing up to be even worse, according to a recent analyst report.  

Experts across industries agree that it’s no longer a matter of questioning whether an attack will occur, but instead planning on when it will occur. Multi-layered security is a must. Keeping data protected from attacks is vital, but so is a plan to bounce back when the worst happens. That’s cyber resilience.   

Sometimes cyber resilience and cyber security are used interchangeably, but they’re not the same thing. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at both concepts and show how these two complementary strategies can help keep your ultra-valuable data secure—especially in the cloud.   

Understanding cyber security  

Cyber security in the cloud is made up of all the best practices, technologies, controls, policies, and capabilities you implement to keep cloud-based data, applications, and infrastructure secure. Keeping data out of the hands of hackers is crucial, but cloud security also extends to protecting against malware, zero-day exploits, distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS), unauthorized access, internal security threats, advanced persistent threats, data loss or corruption caused by employee error, natural disasters, power outages, and so on.  

Cloud security can include user and end device authentication, identity and access management, data privacy measures, data loss prevention, security information and event management (SIEM), and public key infrastructure. All of which must be configured to protect physical networks and hardware, data storage, cloud servers, operating systems, virtualization frameworks, runtime environments, middleware, applications, and end-user and edge devices such as laptops, smartphones, Internet of Things (IoT) cameras, sensors, and actuators.  

That’s a lot to manage, but the good news is that you don’t have to do it all. In the cloud, you share certain security responsibilities with your cloud service provider(s). The Shared Responsibility Model is a framework designed to help you identify which aspects of security you are responsible for, and which aspects the provider will manage.  

Key challenges in cloud cyber security  

Even shared responsibility, however, can be a bit tricky. Various providers have different definitions of responsibility and domains of control versus your definitions. It can be especially difficult to navigate if you use a multi-cloud approach, like 89% of businesses surveyed do.  

Other challenges in cloud cyber security include:  

• Larger and evolving attack surface — When you have data and applications spread across multiple clouds, either public or private, with possibly hundreds or thousands of end users accessing data remotely from a wide range of devices, your attack surface can get massive. That’s not only hard to manage, monitor, and control, it also presents a lot of space for vulnerabilities to creep into your infrastructure.  

• Lack of visibility into infrastructure — Whether you are using infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), or software as a service (SaaS), the cloud can limit your view across the entire ecosystem. Cloud service providers control pieces of that infrastructure and it can be a challenge to get full visibility into your cloud environments and assets. If it’s difficult to identify, it’s even harder to secure.  

• Lack of cloud skills and experience — Before the cloud, on-prem data security was straightforward. Today, the cloud requires new skill sets and expertise that many IT teams simply don’t have. That can lead to misconfiguration of security capabilities, human error, and missing or overlooking serious vulnerabilities.  

• Complicated hybrid ecosystems — Most modern businesses have some data and applications on-prem as well as data and apps in the cloud with two or more cloud providers. Different providers offer different tools and policies for securing data on their platforms, and it can be incredibly challenging to get these disparate systems to secure data seamlessly across the entire ecosystem. That leads to the need to manage and secure multiple siloed environments.  

• Dynamic workloads — The cloud allows you to scale up or down quickly and easily to accommodate bursts of activity, such as adding servers and storage capacity during holidays to meet retail shoppers’ needs. With the potential for extremely dynamic workloads, security becomes more complex.  

• Compliance and governance — Increasing regulatory oversight makes things more complicated for cyber security in the cloud. IT teams must be well versed in a wide range of regulations and statutes and constantly ensure they’re keeping the organization compliant with all of them as cloud workloads scale and evolve.  

Overcoming these challenges can be tough, but well worth the effort. Read our full article to learn more about the benefits of cloud security.

The concept of cyber resilience in cloud storage  

Where cloud cyber security is protecting your cloud-based data, applications, and infrastructure from attacks, human error, and loss, cloud cyber resilience is defined by how you prepare, respond, and recover once disaster strikes.  

Since businesses must pivot to thinking about when, not if, attacks will happen, cyber resilience is critical to keeping operations up and running no matter what happens. It’s critical to have a tested plan for restoring data and applications after an attack. A cyber resilience plan includes:  

• Preparation — Fostering a security-focused culture across your entire organization can help increase resilience after an event.  

• Monitoring and detection — Tools such as intrusion detection systems (IDS) and AI-based anomaly detection can give you an edge when it comes to identifying an issue as quickly as possible.  

• Response and recovery — Plan every step of your response in the event of an attack. Know who will do what to efficiently contain and neutralize the threat and how recovery will proceed. Practice the response to ensure everyone knows their role and to identify any gaps in the process.  

• Improve and adapt — As threats come and go, it’s critical that businesses stay abreast of what’s happening in cyber security. Staying aware of the latest attacks and security best practices and trends will enable you to adapt your response plan to current landscapes.  

What’s the difference between cyber resilience and cyber security?  

Cyber security and cyber resilience in the cloud are related and complementary. Security is what you do to reduce risk of attack and other incidents. Resilience is how you respond and recover after an attack.  

Think of it like this: You might install fire safety equipment such as heat and smoke detectors, sirens, and sprinklers in your office. You make policies about use of electrical appliances and open flames, all to reduce the risk of fire. That’s like cyber security that is designed to protect data and applications from attack and other issues.  

Resilience can be likened to your office’s fire drills, defining exit routes, training staff how to respond and take responsibility during an incident. It’s what happens when fire actually breaks out despite your prevention measures.  

How cyber security and cyber resilience complement each other  

Both cyber security and cyber resilience are critical to data protection. Security without resilience can still spell disaster if an attack occurs because operations will go down, business will be disrupted, further data loss or corruption could occur, and the overall damage could increase. Resilience without security is ineffective because attacks could become common and being able to bounce back after an attack isn’t especially useful if the next attack is just around the corner.  

Keeping cloud-based data, applications, and infrastructure secure and resilient is the best strategy for protecting digital assets. It means you’re doing everything you possibly can to prevent an attack or data loss, but you also acknowledge that some kind of incident is likely inevitable—so you prepare the best you can to identify it quickly, respond efficiently, and recover. 

The role of cyber security in enhancing cyber resilience  

Implementing the right cyber security measures in the cloud is the first step in increasing cyber resilience. The better security you have, the less likely incidents become (although we’ve already established that no system is completely attack-proof). Some best practices include: 

• taking a defense-in-depth or multi-layered security approach;  

• building redundancy into systems;  

• keeping multiple backups of critical data and applications; and  

• segmenting areas of data where appropriate so if one area is breached it doesn’t give the attacker entry to everything else.  

Continuous system monitoring and updates are also key to staying cyber resilient. Monitoring helps you identify and detect incidents sooner, and updating systems ensures that you have the latest security patches and fixes for any known vulnerabilities.  

Find the right solutions to enhance cyber resilience 

It’s important to select proven cyber resilience tools to ensure that your organization can respond and recover efficiently after an attack. The most effective solutions should include:   

• Defense-in-depth — As mentioned above, layering your cyber security will simply make it tougher for attackers to infiltrate your systems.  

• Immutable storage — Immutable means unchangeable, and having storage that can’t be altered or deleted can give you added peace of mind in the event of an incident.  

• Multi-user authentication — Get an extra line of defense by eliminating the single point of control over your most critical data. With two users needed to delete or access data, you can keep attackers from gaining entry to sensitive systems.  

Achieve superior cyber resilience with Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage. Our seamless integration with all S3-compatible ransomware solutions and backup providers means you can quickly bounce back from any cyber security incident. Wasabi immutable storage paired with our unique multi-user authentication account security feature ensures your data can’t be deleted or encrypted, and no fees for egress or API calls lets you regularly test and recover your data to ensure it is up-to-date and secure.