Cyber Resilience: An Essential new Paradigm for Ensuring National Survival

Cyberspace is full of adversaries with potential actors ranging from state-sponsored groups to criminal enterprises, to anyone with an Internet connection who wishes to do harm. Due to financial limitations, organizations historically prioritized what systems and information assets to protect and hoped that an attacker would not find under protected systems. The paradigm that is presented argues that a cyberresilient strategy is a more effective and cost-efficient approach to protecting America's critical infrastructure. The focus on maintaining core functionality, rather than protecting data is at the heart of cyberresliency with the idea to restrict the defense of less critical, or peripheral elements, while ensuring the survival of the system as a whole. This paper presents both the justification and underlying principles for implementing cyber resilience, as well as a standard process for designing and deploying a cyber resilient architecture.