An effective cyber security strategy typically focuses on five connected core areas: Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond and Recover.
- Identify: Understand what you need to safeguard: critical systems and data, who owns them, key dependencies, vulnerabilities and the most likely/high-impact risks.
- Protect: Put proportionate safeguards in place across people, process and technology (e.g. access controls, patching, secure configuration, backups, security awareness).
- Detect: Monitor systems and users to spot suspicious activity early (e.g., logging, alerting, endpoint and network monitoring).
- Respond: Have clear incident response plans, roles and escalation paths so you can contain, investigate and communicate quickly when something happens.
- Recover: Restore services and data safely, minimise downtime and improve controls based on lessons learned (including testing backup and recovery procedures).
No single control prevents every attack, but addressing all five areas reduces exposure, improves early detection, limits impact and helps you recover faster.
