Racing Ahead of Threats: Gold-Medal Strategies for Cyber Resilience

With the Paris 2024 Olympics on the horizon, the organizing committee is fortifying its defenses against a Herculean cybersecurity challenge. They are preparing with heightened vigilance, fully aware of the critical need to safeguard the Games from any form of digital interference, ensuring a seamless and uninterrupted global celebration of athletic excellence.

As the 2021 Tokyo Olympics grappled with an unprecedented surge of cyberattacks, totaling an estimated 450 million, the specter of cyberthreats looms larger than ever over this year’s Games. The rising trend in cyber threats suggests that the possible onslaught of attacks on this year’s Olympics can be more severe:

Forrester’s 2024 report revealed that 78% of organizations suffered at least one breach in the past year — a significant increase from 63% just two years earlier. In an era where downtime is not an option, the need for the Olympics organizers to establish a formidable cyber defense has never been more critical.

The anticipation building around the Paris 2024 Olympics offers a timely opportunity to reflect on the state of your organization’s cybersecurity posture.

This blog post delves into the insights and lessons gleaned from the cyberattacks during the Tokyo Olympics that are informing the strategic preparations underway for the Paris Games. We’ll uncover the power of teamwork and vigilance and share strategies to help you strengthen your cybersecurity defenses.

From the Winner’s Podium to Your Company’s Data: Strategies to Build Cyber Resilience

With an anticipated influx of over 16 million visitors and nearly 1 billion online and television viewers, the Olympics is a testament to the extraordinary scale and significance of such a global event. This vast assembly underscores the necessity for a supply chain that is both robust and secure. Drawing inspiration from the Olympics organizers’ strategic approach to constructing an impregnable defense against sophisticated cyber threats, here are five ways to enhance your cyber resilience.

1. Synchronized Security: The Importance of Teamwork to Ensure Data Protection

The Paris Olympics committee, in partnership with ANSSI, the French National Agency for the Security of Information Systems and cybersecurity experts, is dedicated to a team-based approach for robust digital security. Their strategy includes:

• Cybersecurity Operations Center: A central hub for vigilant monitoring of IT systems and online activities, enabling quick responses to cyberthreats.
• Security-by-Design: Proactive incorporation of risk assessments and support from the outset of projects, ensuring efficient and cost-effective cybersecurity measures.

This collaborative effort is crucial for maintaining the integrity of the Games’ digital landscape.

Teamwork plays a crucial part in cyber resilience for many reasons:

1. It promotes a unified approach to security practices. Every employee needs to understand and follow the same security protocols to reduce the risk of breaches due to human error or lack of awareness.
2. Protecting data privacy and security is everyone’s job. Enhanced organizational security is achieved when each member feels a sense of responsibility, fostering vigilance and prompt reporting of any suspicious activities.
3. It facilitates the implementation of comprehensive data security and cyber resilience solutions.

A crucial part of running a good team is defining everyone’s roles. Our Confidence Platform has elements of this all throughout. Our platform seamlessly integrates with identity management systems to ensure secure, efficient collaboration by granting resource access exclusively to authorized personnel.

AvePoint Cloud Governance streamlines teamwork processes and empowers users to easily manage memberships in Microsoft Teams, spin-up workspaces for new projects, onboard new team members, setup communities and so much more. These features are cognizant of the user’s role and enforce predefined governance rules and frameworks by IT without compromising on business agility.

AvePoint Cloud Backup ensures that organizations can easily delegate the management of backups based on region, role, department, client, or any other criteria, so admins can only manage and restore data for users, mailboxes, and workloads they support.

In addition, AvePoint Cloud Backup’s End-User Restore/ReCenter feature improves collaboration by enabling swift restoration of crucial data, like Teams and Groups content, ensuring uninterrupted operations. It enables users to self-recover data and accelerates the process to reduce IT administrators’ burden, allowing them to concentrate on cybersecurity matters.

2. Champion Your Infrastructure: Secure Your Entire IT Environment

The network security provider of the Tokyo Olympics acknowledged the importance of protecting the supply chain because of its extensive IT infrastructure. The Paris Olympics committee has been working toward the same goal by ensuring that all vendors, participants, volunteers, and employees are required to comply with their security standards, and receive proper training in addition to the alliances it has forged with cybersecurity experts, major technology companies, law enforcement, and government agencies, as part of its holistic cybersecurity approach.

Securing all fronts of your infrastructure requires a thorough understanding of your IT environment to know where vulnerabilities lie. However, the task of managing access permissions across various cloud platforms has become even more challenging:

Just looking at Microsoft 365, a recent study confirms that there are over 40,000 permission types available to users, services, and devices — with half of them categorized as high risk. This is good news for cybercriminals who use sophisticated tools to identify weak aspects of your infrastructure that they can exploit as entry points for their attacks.

Tools like AvePoint Insights allow organizations to identify vulnerabilities in their IT infrastructure by giving a comprehensive view of their Microsoft 365 environment. It enables the tracking of workspace access and the sensitive data that specific workspaces hold, aside from identifying potential external threats. Through both real-time and scheduled scans, it assesses data risks, scrutinizes file contents, and ranks issues according to the organization’s risk parameters and compliance needs.

3. Defending Your Data Estate: The Vital Role of Secure Data Resilience

In light of unprecedented cyberattacks earlier this year against several French government institutions, the Olympics organizers are keenly aware of the need for data protection and recovery as integral parts of their security framework

Data resilience means organizations have the capability to swiftly bounce back from disruptions and restore their critical data and digital environment to exactly how they were before the incident. This requires measures to ensure data is protected, easily recoverable, and optimally stored to mitigate risks, including those associated with data sprawl.

AvePoint Cloud Backup’s App-Aware feature goes beyond mere file recovery; it meticulously restores the full spectrum of your software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, such as Microsoft 365, Azure Active Directory and Virtual Machines, Dynamics 365, Salesforce, and Google Workspace. This includes all settings, configurations, and the intricate web of data relationships, reverting everything to its original state before any disruption. The result is a smooth and uninterrupted digital experience after recovery.

For unmatched speed in data recovery, AvePoint Cloud Backup Express allows organizations to restore their SaaS data 20X faster than traditional cloud backup. Powered by Microsoft 365 Backup Storage, AvePoint Cloud Backup Express enables customers to protect and secure their investments in Exchange Online, OneDrive, SharePoint Online, Teams, and Microsoft 365 Groups with greater speed and scale.

4. Heightened Vigilance: Why Threat Intelligence Monitoring Matters

The Tokyo Olympics organizers implemented threat intelligence monitoring by continuously collecting and analyzing threat information from the Games’ network systems and external sources. They also used a huge team of cybersecurity professionals to monitor and rapidly respond to potential threats in real-time.

In like fashion, Paris Olympics officials, together with ANSSI and private sector partners, have been developing secure networks, conducting comprehensive audits, and building rapid incident response teams to bolster overall cyber defenses.

Threat intelligence monitoring matters because it provides real-time insights into potential threats, enabling proactive defense measures. By continuously analyzing emerging threats, organizations can quickly respond to and keep cyberattacks at bay, enhancing their overall resilience and safeguarding critical assets.

AvePoint Cloud Backup provides an AI-powered ransomware detection feature that enhances a company's protection against ransomware threats. This feature works by monitoring for unusual activity that could indicate a ransomware attack, allowing organizations to mitigate the impact of such threats and maintain operational continuity even in the face of advanced cyberattacks.

5. Going for Gold in Data Recovery: The Winning Strategy of Simulation Drills

Both the Tokyo and Paris Olympics organizers recognize the need to conduct simulations to test their systems ahead of the events as part of their cybersecurity preparations. The Paris Olympics committee has enlisted the help of ethical hackers to stress test their systems and has also been using artificial intelligence (AI) to help them triage threats.

Loss of critical corporate data is a catastrophe nobody wants to experience. How sure are you that your data protection and data security systems are working and can restore your data and systems to their pre-attack state? That’s why performing simulation drills is vital because it can provide a realistic assessment of your resilience capabilities. Regularly testing security measures helps your team to respond to incidents quickly and effectively, minimizing potential damage and downtime.

Want to see a live demonstration of six data loss scenarios in Microsoft 365? Watch the free webinar where we simulate these data loss scenarios, demonstrating the potential impact and ease with which critical data can be compromised or lost. Learn from expert insights on both user and IT admin errors and understand the crucial steps needed to protect your business data effectively.

Carrying the Torch Forward with AvePoint

The exhaustive efforts of the Tokyo and Paris Olympics organizers to orchestrate successful Games shine a spotlight on the critical need for teamwork and vigilance in cybersecurity. As cyber threats continue to advance and diversify, a holistic and watchful approach is essential.

In parallel, Olympians endure extensive, strenuous training, all leading to the pinnacle event — a true test of their preparedness and prowess against the world’s elite, each vying for the crown in a fiercely competitive arena. This mirrors the cyber battleground where an organization’s defenses must be infallible, ready to withstand the relentless barrage of cyberattacks at all times.

AvePoint's Resilience Suite helps organizations build their cyber resilience by providing a range of capabilities to protect critical data and ensure data security. The suite includes tools to protect data with AvePoint Cloud Backup, as well as to classify and tag data throughout its lifecycle, and optimize storage with AvePoint Opus. The suite is designed to simplify the approach to secure data, meet compliance obligations, and manage data risk across multiple cloud platforms.

AvePoint recently earned industry recognition and was cited in Forrester’s “Top Seven Components of Data Resilience In A Hybrid Cloud World” as a notable SaaS application data protection (SADP) vendor that can help secure multi-cloud environments.