This article was originally published on CIO Dive.

What keeps IT leaders awake at night? Security—and resilience.

Security is hands-down one of the biggest challenges and necessities organizations face today. But business resilience follows closely behind. 

The good news: by investing in the critical components of their network, organizations can dramatically increase security resilience. 

Building more security resilience into an organization—making it easier to identify, mitigate and adapt to ever-changing risks—ultimately creates better business resilience, but they have to be done together, not separately.

“Resilience is a business differentiator,” wrote Gartner. “If your competitors suffer through delays and downtimes while your business carries on, then your IT services have created an opportunity to showcase the superiority of your product.”

Inextricably bound

This is becoming so critical, in fact, that by the end of 2025, almost one-third of enterprises will have new roles that focus on IT resilience—and they will improve end-to-end reliability and recoverability by at least 45%, the research firm added. 

To achieve these goals, leaders must address a comprehensive approach to security across the business.

Acceleration path

Fortunately, whether they have dedicated resources or not, there are a number of opportunities to accelerate security resilience today. By focusing investments on these four aspects of infrastructure, organizations can enhance their security resilience:

1. Resilience through visibility. In the hybrid workplace, there’s no better spot to control security and build resilience than the network. Acting as the natural connector between people, devices, data, locations and platforms, the network is the logical place to identify and inspect traffic and behavior. And when IT and security teams can collaborate in a single, cloud-based dashboard, they gain a common view of the company’s overall infrastructure and policies. This visibility—managed in a simple, cohesive experience independent of user devices—empowers teams to rapidly find anomalies, rate risk and mitigate threats. It also improves the team’s productivity by slashing error-prone manual processes.
2. Resilience through scale. As security threats escalate and the source of attacks rapidly shifts due to economic and geopolitical changes, threat intelligence and response becomes a critical component of security resilience. True resilience means the ability to adapt to these new threat vectors quickly, even if they don’t occur immediately on your network. Cloud-based network management and global threat intelligence platforms can observe more security activity than any individual network monitor—across more locations—and rapidly roll out responses. Scale equals speed when it comes to mitigation.
3. Resilience through intelligence. By choosing appliances that are part of a platform that natively integrates commercial threat intelligence, organizations are assured they have access to world-class researchers, analysts and engineers, as well as telemetry and systems. This equips them with rapid, accurate and actionable threat intelligence that automatically updates their technologies whenever information becomes available from data around the globe. Additionally, computer vision observes and learns, while automation keeps networks and applications current—all without human intervention.
4. Resilience through simplicity. Security has become a Gordian knot—complex and rife with multiple systems that can (and often do) compete with each other for attention or and priority and frequently cause update and maintenance conundrums and can generate poor user experiences and seemingly endless help desk calls. These may be due to user “workarounds,” an inability to use the security tools or breaches. The elegance of simplicity is a powerful asset.

Organizations that invest in these four key elements of their network will increase their security resilience and technology leaders will (hopefully) get a good night’s sleep. Sweet dreams. 

Visit our safe environments experience page to learn how Cisco Meraki helps businesses protect what matters most.