Top 5 Things to Know About Cyber Resilience for Network Devices

Cyber resilience is a hot topic as more and more organizations realize that it is not a matter of if but when they will be attacked. In fact, 94% of cloud users were targeted at some point during every month of 2023, and of those, 62% were successfully compromised.

However, one of the areas that gets lost in cyber resilience discussions are network devices, even though they are essential to keeping your business up and running. In these five questions, we'll get to the bottom of why cyber resilience for network devices is lagging and what to do about it.

1. What is cyber resilience for network devices?

The ability to persistently prevent, withstand, and recover from disruptions to network devices due to cyberattacks or man-made or natural disasters.

2. Why are network devices hard to keep resilient?

There are two primary reasons. First, unlike endpoints, there are hundreds of different manufacturers that make up your network device topology in your environment. Having people manually maintain and manage a diverse environment is hard enough. But even the largest and most well-resourced organizations find it difficult to manage that complexity all the time to keep network devices resilient. Despite best efforts, 58% of breaches are surfaced by third parties or the attackers themselves, not the organization’s security teams and tools.

Cyber resilience for network devices is a time, resource, and priority problem that should be automated.

This leads to the second reason why it’s hard to keep network devices resilient. People don’t automate because many automation systems shift the burden of writing automations to the user. Most organizations don't have people sitting on the bench with the skillset to take on the coding required. Others that have gone down the path of packaged automations have been burned because they don't get alerted when something fails so it can be fixed.

For your network devices to be resilient you need to automate, and it must be done responsibly.

3. Why is it important for network devices to be cyber resilient?

The world depends on networks, so network devices need to be up and running, even in the face of disruptions that threaten downtime. At the same time, while AI initiatives can be a boon to businesses, in the hands of threat actors, the technology increases the success rate of cyberattacks. Threat actors are using AI to help discover the latest exploits and exploit vulnerabilities faster. In 2023, the average time to exploit vulnerabilities was 44 days, but in 25% of cases, exploits were available on the same day, and 75% were exploited within 19 days.

The odds of your network being disrupted are increasing. Cybersecurity technology that only monitors and tells you about your risk posture or threats is not enough. You need cyber resilience, not just monitoring, to stay ahead of today's threats. The cyber resilience of your network devices will give you confidence that your business will keep moving forward.

4. What are the key components of cyber resilience for network devices?

Network devices that are cyber resilient are in a known and trusted state – all the time. This requires the following capabilities to maintain resilience:

5. What are the benefits of cyber resilience for network devices?

Keeping your network devices resilient means that:

A Final Word on Cyber Resilience of Network Devices

When you lean into automation, you can achieve all of this and realize a strong ROI.