Beyond Prevention: How Cyber Resiliency Can Help Your Agency Achieve Its Mission Objectives

The urgency for robust cyber resilience has never been more evident in the wake of high-profile cyberattacks that have plagued various government agencies. A crippling cyberattack can severely threaten an agency's ability to fulfill its mission, often disrupting crucial public services integral to our society.

The 2024 Rubrik Public Sector Virtual Summit tackled this pressing challenge head-on. At this virtual event, attendees learned various methodologies from government leaders for securing critical data, recovering swiftly from cyberattacks and cultivating a culture of cyber resilience vital to ensuring seamless mission continuity for federal and defense agencies.

Evolution of The Government Cyber Threat Landscape

Over the past decade, the cyber threat landscape has shifted from focusing on cyber espionage to now including cyberattacks as a primary concern, according to Dana Madsen, deputy director of the Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center (CTIC). While cyber espionage remains prevalent, daily cyberattacks increase the complexity of the landscape. This proliferation includes state actors like Russia, China, Iran, North Korea and non-state actors.

For example, using low-sophistication techniques, the Cyber Army of Russia Reborn (CAR) has conducted opportunistic attacks on sectors like water, energy and agriculture. The Cyber Avengers, linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), has targeted programmable logic controllers, demonstrating the shift towards cyber-physical threats. Further, ransomware remains a significant concern, with incidents causing widespread disruptions across federal and defense agencies.

The Limitations of Traditional Cyber Prevention in Government

Cybersecurity at federal and defense agencies has historically centered on prevention. This strategy involved deploying firewalls, antivirus software and regular system updates to patch vulnerabilities. These preventive techniques aim to avert cyber incidents by targeting known threats. While essential, this approach has inherent limitations.

Exclusively relying on these preventive methods can leave critical infrastructure vulnerable to zero-day exploits and novel attack vectors. Sophisticated adversaries targeting federal and defense systems often circumvent standard preventive measures, compromising sensitive information and agency operations. For instance, nation-state actors and advanced persistent threats (APTs) continuously develop new ways to breach defenses, rendering static prevention methods insufficient.

Ensuring Mission Resilience With Data Backup and Recovery

Cyber resiliency represents a paradigm shift from a reactive to a proactive mindset, underpinned by the awareness that cyber incidents in federal and defense agencies are inevitable. This includes the mission-critical importance of data backup and recovery. Think of data backup and recovery as the lifeline of mission resilience. They're your ultimate safety net, ready to step in and restore lost data and keep critical operations running smoothly during or after an incident. To make sure these plans work when needed, you can't just set them and forget them. Regular, thorough testing is a must. It's like rehearsing for a symphony-only by practicing can you ensure everything goes off without a hitch.

Federal and defense agencies face a host of challenges with modern IT infrastructures. Picture data scattered across cloud services, on-premises servers and various endpoints. You wouldn't use the same tool for every task around the house; the same goes for data recovery-it must be tailored and specific. Plus, as the volume of data explodes, the complexity of recovering it grows, too.

Add to that the ever-changing rules and regulations and human error, and it becomes clear why this isn't a walk in the park. One major hurdle we've seen is simply figuring out where all the critical data lives and who has access to it. Many agencies have a general sense of their vital data, but specifics about its location and access can be murky. This ambiguity can seriously slow down effective backup and recovery.

Governance and Testing: The Cornerstones of Effectiveness

Robust governance is essential to effective data backup and recovery. Agencies need to define critical data dynamically and ensure their backup and recovery protocols stay in step with their evolving operations. Think of it as an ongoing dialogue rather than a monologue-constant updates and realistic, practical testing ensure these plans aren't just theoretically sound, they are genuinely effective when needed.

Transparent governance should offer structured feedback loops, bringing attention to gaps and promptly addressing them. Leaders must be well-versed in the policies, strategies and risk management frameworks supporting data protection and recovery.

Weaving Governance Into The NIST 2.0 Framework

The NIST 2.0 framework involves layering governance within your backup and recovery strategies. It's about more than just having protocols; it's about ensuring they comprehensively cover data protection's technical, managerial and operational aspects.

Clear governance protocols are the bedrock here-they outline who's responsible for what and how resources should be allocated. These protocols shouldn't be static; they must be living documents that evolve as threats and operational needs change. Prioritizing critical data and services helps ensure that your backup and recovery efforts are thorough and focused where needed.

Meaningful Testing: More Than Just Homework

Testing your backup and recovery processes isn't a one-and-done deal. It's an ongoing commitment to improving and ensuring resilience against real-world threats. You can start with a comprehensive inventory and risk assessment and then move to identifying and prioritizing your critical data through regular evaluations.

"It's essential to test the full end-to-end backup process, including restoration and user access, to ensure the entire system works as intended under real-world conditions. Allocate sufficient resources and time to conduct these comprehensive tests," said Rubrik's Chief Information Security Officer Mike Mestrovich, during the 2024 Rubrik Public Sector Virtual Summit.

Testing should simulate real-world conditions-cyberattacks, power outages, natural disasters. Most importantly, use what you learn from these tests to refine and enhance your procedures continuously. It's about building trust in your processes and being able to sleep at night knowing you're prepared for whatever comes your way.

Leadership and Accountability at The Heart of It All

Effective backup and recovery strategies hinge on solid leadership and a culture of accountability. Agency leaders can promote a culture where lessons learned from every test or incident feed into policy and procedural improvements.

Regular engagement and clear communication about policies, risks and strategies are also crucial. Leaders should ensure their teams have the resources to close any gaps identified during testing, keeping backup and recovery strategies robust and adaptive to an ever-changing threat landscape.

Creating a Culture of Continuous Improvement

Ultimately, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and accountability is where the magic happens. Transitioning from merely preventing attacks to adopting a comprehensive cyber resiliency strategy is within your reach and will have a tremendous impact. By leveraging pre-attack data analysis, capturing malware signatures and assessing data sensitivity from the outset, your team is poised to take control, orchestrating swift cyber recoveries, and ensuring preparedness.

To that end, Rubrik's Security Cloud platform can be a vital ally in your agency's cyber resilience journey. By safeguarding your agency's data across various environments-from data centers to the cloud and crucial SaaS applications like Microsoft 365 and VMware-it consolidates your security policies and correlates threats across all data silos. This equips your team with a holistic understanding of data interactions and potential vulnerabilities, fortifying your defenses.

Cyber resiliency is more than just defense; it guarantees seamless operational continuity and instills robust confidence in your agency's digital domain.

By embracing this transformative shift, your agency can stay ahead in the cybersecurity battlefield and protect critical government data with resilience and foresight.

Missed the 2024 Rubrik Public Sector Summit? You can still unlock more insights by registering to watch the sessions now. Learn from government and industry experts how to:

• Enhance data integrity for mission success

• Develop cybersecurity strategies that ensure rapid recovery

• Seamlessly transition to the cloud with a cloud-native approach

• Implement a zero-trust strategy for effective collaboration

Register now to access these actionable insights and drive immediate improvements in your agency.

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