Cyber-Resilience – A Major Challenge for the 21st Century

The beginning of the 21st century is a pivotal time. Our world is rapidly moving towards a new virtual world based on digital technologies. While the third industrial revolution is centered on processing the new key raw material, data, the fourth industrial revolution will be more revolutionary still. We can already see the outlines of this new world. It will be based on the convergence of new technologies including artificial intelligence, extreme robotics, quantum computing, nano-technologies, and genetic engineering. Future generations may spend much of their lives outside the physical world. Our children and grandchildren will experience and have to contend with the reality we are building today.

Only a few of us have a clear understanding of the intrinsic risks of the digital world. Yet digital hygiene and cyber-immunity have to become part of the daily routine of our professional and private lives. Thus cyber-resilience remains a major challenge, as the global socio-economic ecosystem will soon be entirely dependent on all things digital.

Cyber-Resilience and Essential Services: Risk Management, Business Continuity, Cyber-Security, Crisis Management

The European NIS directive, aimed at considerably strengthening European digital resilience, concerns all stakeholders. Affected in particular will be the so-called “operators of essential services” such as the energy sector, transportation, banks, market infrastructure, health, digital infrastructure, and “digital service providers”.

EBRC – European Business Reliance Centre – puts its “cyber-resilience” experience and know-how at the service of businesses, thus supporting their efforts to comply with these new requirements. EBRC’s pragmatic “cyber-resilience” strategy is based on experience acquired over the course of 18 years in the field of risk management, business continuity management, sensitive-data protection and security, and cyber-security consulting services, all the time ensuring alignment with best practices and international certifications. 

This experience was acquired in a range of sectors including European finance (banking, funds, FinTech, insurance, etc.) and with national and international stakeholders in the fields of e-commerce, the health and biobank sector, manufacturing industries, international institutions, the defense sector, the space sector, ICT services, major law firms, start-ups, and more. EBRC’s clients have to be able to guarantee high levels of data availability, confidentiality, integrity, and auditability, as well as ensuring operational effectiveness in an increasingly regulated environment.

From Cyber-Security to Cyber-Resilience 

Guaranteeing business continuity in a digital environment increasingly exposed to risks requires new proactive and better integrated strategies. EBRC promotes cyber-resilience by implementing the latest standards and best practices to enable system protection “by design” and to provide guarantees to organizations that put trust in digital infrastructure.

In 2017, we learned that no organization is immune from cyber-attacks and incidents with the potential for economic and/or reputational impact. EBRC’s teams look beyond the usual principles of protection to offer a comprehensive and integrated cyber-resilience strategy aimed at ensuring business continuity. In essence, resilience is the ability of a body or a system to recover its initial properties after alteration.

Unlike cyber-security, cyber-resilience looks beyond technical considerations, and focuses on developing an effective immune system for each digitally-dependent line of business. The risk is evaluated and mitigated in order to limit the impact of the incident, to quickly detect threats, to enable critical applications to continue running, to preserve data, and quickly resume business as usual.

The cyber-resilience promoted by EBRC makes cyber-security a central focus for the business. Business continuity is guaranteed by continuously identifying, protecting, detecting, responding to the incident and restoring systems.

To this end, EBRC anticipated the implementation of the NIS directive, which had to be transcribed into national legislation by May 2018. As a “digital service provider” working for “essential service operators”, EBRC intends to take its responsibilities seriously by building a strong ecosystem and alliances with European partners. This way, customers can be sure to trust digital services in Europe.

Cyber-Resilience towards Cyber-Reliance 

Risks are Inherent to Cyberspace

Dragged into an exponential digitization, societies and companies are depending more and more on cyberspace, which gathers essential means for the economy. Human errors, bad practices, cyber-crimes… The fast increase of cyber-threats demonstrates the urgency of the situation, which affects each company and organization.

Cyber-Resilience: A New Paradigm

Our dependence on the digital world requires a change of behavior, for more security, but also for more resilience by anticipating threats. It is now vital to integrate cyber-resilience as a necessary and urgent change of paradigm, to adopt best practices to be able to prevent, identify threats, prepare, protect, detect, analyze, respond, and recover.

Read the new EBRC Whitepaper "Cyber-Resilience towards Cyber-Reliance" 

Drawing on experience of more than 30 years in the ICT and financial fields, Yves Reding launched the European Business Reliance Centre (EBRC) in 2000 with the aim of developing a European center of excellence for the management and protection of sensitive information.

By positioning themselves as a one-stop-shop ICT operator in the heart of Europe, Yves and his team catapulted EBRC onto the international stage, particularly thanks to a complete service portfolio ranging from data centre, to cloud and managed services but also cyber-resilience services. In June 2018, EBRC won the European “Excellence in Cloud Service Award with local impact 2018” at the European DataCloud Awards ceremony. Deeply committed to promoting the data center industry and the ICT sector in Europe, Yves is the President of the Cloud Community Europe Luxembourg association, Vice-President of the Board of Directors of ICT Luxembourg as well as a member of the Board of Directors of the European Data Centre Association (EUDCA).