The Evolving Concept of Digital Resilience

As organizations increasingly rely on technology to achieve their missions, building resilience into their tech stacks is becoming a higher priority. The massive investments organizations are making to support digital transformation have resulted in rapid changes. In environments that are affected by artificial intelligence, shifting supply chains and evolving cybersecurity threats, resilience is critically important.

The stakes are higher than ever. CDW cybersecurity research has revealed that 43% of organizations have suffered breaches that cost them between $1 million and $10 million in downtime, and 8% suffered a breach costing more than $10 million. Organizations must be able to bounce back quickly from disruptions.

Further, the concept of resilience itself is evolving. In addition to cyber resilience, organizations need to be resilient across their operations. For example, they need to be financially resilient, and they need to have resilient supply chains. One way to improve resilience is to adopt platforms that can deliver multiple capabilities, such as Cisco XDR, an extended detection and response tool that can integrate across numerous technology areas, enabling IT teams to make decisions more quickly and accurately.

IT operations have become significantly more complex in the past decade as the adoption of mobile and cloud technologies has increased, artificial intelligence has become more widely used, and security threats have evolved. All of this has made cybersecurity and cyber resilience efforts more complex as well. In fact, CDW’s research indicated that the vast majority (68%) of organizations operate between 10 and 49 security tools or platforms.

Solutions such as Cisco XDR can facilitate resilience by integrating security and data components from these complex IT environments. XDR provides deep telemetry and visibility across networks and endpoints, helping organizations reduce the time between an incident and response and recovery efforts.

IT and security leaders can see what’s happening on the network and across the environment more quickly and comprehensively, enabling more precise and effective controls. For example, these tools enable IT administrators to implement rules that block suspicious traffic on the network or isolate devices that may be compromised to contain the spread of malware.

These capabilities help IT teams prevent cybersecurity incidents and recover from them more quickly when they do occur. Making sure operations such as supply chains, financial systems and customer-facing applications can bounce back quickly from an incident is essential to cyber resilience.

Building resilience is difficult for many organizations. The concept is relatively new to many technology leaders, and the growing complexity of IT environments only adds to the challenge. A partner such as CDW can help organizations with their resiliency initiatives. In addition to the leadership and training needed, CDW has strong relationships with security vendors such as Cisco, which helps organizations optimize their security control implementations.

CDW offers professional services to configure security solutions from vendors such as Cisco and implement them into an organization’s overall strategy for security and resilience. CDW’s managed services can further bolster an organization’s resilience by providing 24/7 staffing, monitoring and response capabilities, removing a major burden from in-house IT teams and letting them focus on projects that deliver business value.

Ultimately, cyberthreats and other disruptions represent a growing risk for organizations across industries, but CDW and Cisco can help organizations build their resilience so they can bounce back quickly.