Cyber resilience: What it is & why it’s important
In today’s age of high-profile data breaches, supply chain attacks, and aging legacy software, smart organizations understand it’s no longer a matter of whether their systems will be compromised but when it will happen next.
In fact, one recent study found that 68% of organizations experienced a cyberattack within the last 12 months (experiencing an attack doesn’t necessarily mean it was successful). With the average data breach setting impacted companies back $4.88 million in 2024 — a 10% uptick from the previous year — organizations are increasingly doing what they can to continuously protect their systems and data despite the adverse cyber events that are inevitably heading their way.
To secure their systems, safeguard their data, and maintain their operations in any circumstances, today’s leading organizations are moving beyond traditional cybersecurity measures and embracing the concept of cyber resilience.
Keep reading to learn more about cyber resilience, the benefits that come with it, key challenges, and how to get started on your journey to becoming a more resilient organization.
What is cyber resilience?
Cyber resilience is an organization’s ability to withstand, adapt to, and recover from cyberattacks and disruptions. Unlike traditional cybersecurity — which focuses primarily on preventing attacks — cyber resilience encompasses a broader strategy that includes anticipating potential threats, ensuring real-time detection, and having robust response and recovery plans in place. This comprehensive approach not only focuses on preventing cyberthreats but also on ensuring that business operations can continue seamlessly during and after an incident occurs.
In recent years, cyber resilience has become even more important as cyberthreats become more sophisticated and frequent. From data breaches to ransomware attacks, organizations face a wide range of potential disruptions — all of which can cripple operations if not handled properly.
By adopting a cyber resilience framework — like NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) and ISO 27001 — companies can not only protect their critical assets but also ensure they can quickly bounce back from incidents — maintaining customer trust, operational stability, and profitability because of it. This holistic approach is crucial in today’s digital landscape where the ability to respond to and recover from cyberthreats is just as important as preventing them.
Benefits of cyber resilience
While more and more organizations are prioritizing cyber resilience, few of them have actually achieved it. One study found that just 7% of organizations say they could recover data and restore business processes within three days of a cyberattack.
As enterprises and critical infrastructure companies continue to strengthen their cyber capabilities, this number will undoubtedly increase. As a result, more and more organizations will experience the transformative benefits that cyber resilience delivers.
Secure data
Cyber resilience helps organizations protect their data even in the face of cyberthreats. By implementing strong security measures and continuous monitoring capabilities, organizations can protect sensitive information from breaches, unauthorized access, and other cyber risks. This security is crucial for maintaining the integrity and confidentiality of data — which is important in every scenario, but even more so in industries that handle personal, financial, or proprietary information.
Safeguarding data not only protects organizations from potential legal and financial harm, it also helps them maintain trust with customers, partners, and other stakeholders — something critical for long-term success.
Faster recovery
Another key benefit of cyber resilience is the ability to recover rapidly from cyber incidents.
With well-defined response and recovery plans, organizations can minimize the time it takes to restore normal operations after a breach or attack. This reduces the impact on business functions, ensuring that mission-critical services remain available and reducing overall disruption. Being able to bounce back quickly from an incident is essential for maintaining operational efficiency and minimizing potential losses — both financially and in terms of organizational reputation.
What’s more, cyber resilience also gives organizations a competitive edge because they can continue serving customers and meeting business obligations even after a cyberattack.
Minimized downtime
Cyber resilience significantly reduces downtime by ensuring that systems can either continue running during an attack or be restored quickly afterward. With downtime costing IT companies as much as $450,000 per hour — and enterprises as much as $5 million per hour — cyber resilience is a must-have for organizations focused on the bottom line.
By minimizing downtime, organizations can maintain continuous operations, meet deadlines, and uphold service-level agreements (SLAs). This uninterrupted functionality is vital for preserving revenue streams and maintaining a strong market position — especially in today’s fast-paced business environment.
Stronger reputation
Cyber resilience also helps organizations maintain a stronger reputation. By demonstrating the ability to withstand and recover from cyberattacks without significant disruption, organizations are more likely to retain customer trust and loyalty. After all, a strong reputation is built on reliability and security, both of which are reinforced by cyber resilience.
In contrast, organizations that suffer a severe breach or extended downtime can experience lasting damage to their brand image; just ask CrowdStrike. By prioritizing cyber resilience, organizations can enhance their reputation and build a stronger, more trustworthy brand.
Reduced financial impact
As you learned earlier in this article, the financial impacts of cyber incidents can be devastating. Costs range from immediate response and recovery expenses to long-term losses in revenue and market value. Cyber resilience helps reduce these financial impacts by preventing extensive damage and ensuring quick recovery.
By minimizing downtime, securing data, and maintaining operations, organizations can avoid the high costs associated with breaches — including fines, legal fees, and lost business. Additionally, a resilient approach can reduce insurance premiums and other financial risks, making it a cost-effective strategy for safeguarding an organization’s bottom line.
Improved compliance
All organizations must comply with international, local, and industry regulations and standards — like GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA. Cyber resilience plays a key role in achieving this.
By implementing robust security measures and maintaining continuous monitoring, organizations can ensure they meet regulatory requirements related to data protection, privacy, and cybersecurity. Improved compliance not only helps avoid legal penalties and fines, it also enhances the organization’s credibility and trustworthiness.
Additionally, by demonstrating a commitment to security and resilience, organizations can strengthen their relationships with partners, customers, and regulators — leading to new opportunities and competitive advantages in the marketplace.
Cyber resilience: Challenges & key considerations
While cyber resilience is critical for organizations to effectively protect against and recover from cyber threats, several challenges can complicate these efforts.
The ever-evolving threat landscape
Today’s threat landscape changes constantly, which poses a significant challenge to cyber resilience because threats are always changing in sophistication and scale. Cybercriminals are continuously developing new tactics — such as advanced persistent threats, zero-day exploits, and ransomware — which make traditional security measures insufficient.
To maintain resilience, organizations must adopt a proactive approach that includes continuous monitoring, threat intelligence, and rapid response capabilities. At the same time, security teams need to keep pace with emerging threats and quickly adapt their defenses to secure their systems.
In our age of cloud computing, IoT devices, and remote work, the attack surface is expanding — making it even more critical for organizations to stay ahead of the curve. Failing to do so can lead to massive data breaches, financial losses, and reputational damage.
Resource limitations
Resource limitations are a common challenge in achieving cyber resilience, particularly for small- to medium-sized enterprises that lack the budget and personnel needed to implement and maintain comprehensive security measures.
Cybersecurity often requires significant investment in technology, skilled personnel, and continuous training — all of which can strain an organization’s resources. At the same time, limited resources can also lead to prioritization issues where critical areas of cybersecurity may be underfunded or overlooked. This, in turn, makes it different for organizations to maintain a robust defense against cyber threats, leaving them vulnerable to attacks.
To address these challenges, organizations need to strategically allocate resources and prioritize the protection of the most critical assets and defense against the most damaging threats. By hiring cybersecurity experts and investing in purpose-built cybersecurity tools, organizations can bridge the resource gap and tighten up security on their systems.
Integration issues
Whenever organizations attempt to bring together several different cybersecurity tools, technologies, and processes into a cohesive strategy, integration issues can arise. Unfortunately, a lack of seamless integration can lead to gaps in security, inefficiencies, and difficulties in incident response.
In many cases, integration issues occur because organizations use a mix of legacy systems, new technologies, and third-party services, which often don’t communicate well with each other. Integration challenges can also lead to an overwhelming amount of data from disparate systems, making it harder to detect and respond to threats in a timely manner.
To mitigate these issues, organizations should focus on adopting interoperable solutions and invest in cybersecurity tooling that can centralize and streamline security operations. Since ensuring that every component of cybersecurity infrastructure is well-integrated is essential for maintaining a resilient defense against cyber threats, it’s worth looking into open source solutions that are flexible by design and can smoothly integrate with other technologies.
Data management
The sheer volume and variety of data generated by modern organizations can be overwhelming. Cyber resilient organizations need to master data management, which involves ensuring data is securely stored, easily accessible, and properly categorized.
Unfortunately, organizations often run into challenges due to the need to protect sensitive information, comply with regulatory requirements, and manage data across multiple environments. Since poor data management can result in data breaches, a loss of customer trust, and non-compliance penalties, organizations need to implement strong data governance policies, encrypt their data, and use data loss prevention tools to safeguard it.
For the best results, organizations should regularly audit their data infrastructure and update their data management practices accordingly to keep pace with evolving cyber threats and regulatory shifts.
Employee error
One of the biggest challenges to cyber resilience is employee error. Since humans make mistakes, it’s not uncommon for teams to fall for phishing scams, mishandle sensitive data, follow suboptimal password practices, or accidentally share confidential information.
Despite profound technological advancements in cybersecurity, humans continue to be a weak link; employees, after all, are usually the first line of defense against cyber threats.
To mitigate this risk, organizations need to invest in comprehensive cybersecurity training and awareness programs, ensuring that employees understand the importance of security protocols and know how to recognize potential threats. Regularly updating training to cover current threats and reinforcing a security-minded culture can help reduce the risk of employee-related incidents.
Organizations should also look to implement policies that minimize the potential impact of human error — like multi-factor authentication and least privilege access.
Communication
Effective communication is a cornerstone of cyber resilience; it ensures that all stakeholders are informed, coordinated, and prepared to respond to cyber threats. When a cyber incident occurs, clear and timely communication can significantly reduce the impact of the attack by facilitating swift decision-making and efficient resource allocation.
When an attack occurs, communication challenges can arise due to the complexity of information, the speed at which decisions need to be made, and the number of parties involved (e.g., IT teams, security engineers, legal advisors, and executive leadership). During an incident, time is of the essence; any miscommunication or delays in sharing vital information can make the situation much worse, leading to confusion, ineffective responses, and potentially greater damage.
To address these challenges, organizations should establish a communication plan that outlines the roles, responsibilities, and procedures for internal and external communication during a cyber incident. This plan should be tested and refined regularly to ensure that all team members are prepared to act quickly and cohesively when a real threat emerges.
To make sure your team can stay connected even if their main channels of communication are compromised, having an out-of-band communications solution is a must.
Getting started with cyber resilience
As you begin your journey with cyber resilience, you need to understand the specific risks your organization faces and develop a comprehensive plan to respond to them.
Fortunately, there are a number of tried-and-true cybersecurity frameworks that can provide step-by-step guidance on developing an organizational framework for cyber resilience. The NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF), MITRE Cyber Resilience Engineering Framework (CREF) and NCSC Cybersecurity Assessment Framework (CAF) are three popular frameworks with a strong cyber resilience focus, but the best framework for your organization will depend on your size, industry, and region.
With that in mind, here are seven general steps you can take to get started with cyber resilience at your organization.
1. Assess your current security posture
Kickstart the process by conducting a comprehensive assessment of your organization’s current cybersecurity posture to identify existing strengths, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities. This assessment should include reviewing your security infrastructure, policies, and processes and ensuring compliance with industry standards.
Next, perform a risk assessment to understand the potential impact of various threats on your organization. The insights gained from this evaluation should form the foundation of your cyber resilience strategy, enabling you to prioritize areas that need improvement and allocate resources effectively.
2. Develop a cyber resilience strategy
After assessing your current posture, develop a cyber resilience strategy that addresses both preventive and responsive measures that protect your organization against cyber threats. This strategy should include risk management, incident response, business continuity, and disaster recovery plans.
At this stage, it’s crucial to align your strategy with your organization’s specific needs, industry regulations, and the evolving threat landscape. Very broadly, your plan should focus on protecting critical assets, maintaining operations during an attack, and ensuring a swift recovery.
For the best results, your strategy should involve input from all relevant stakeholders — including IT, legal, and executive teams — to ensure it’s both practical and effective in mitigating risks and minimizing the impact of cyber incidents.
3. Implement security controls
After you’ve developed your strategy, it’s time to start implementing robust security controls. These include both technical and administrative measures — like firewalls, encryption, multi-factor authentication, and access controls — that work together to protect your organization’s critical assets and crown-jewel data.
Your security controls should address the specific threats and vulnerabilities you identified during your security assessment. Since the threat landscape continues to evolve, it’s important to regularly update and patch your security systems to protect against new and emerging threats, ensuring your defenses remain strong over time.
4. Train your team
Since human error is one of the leading causes of security breaches, training your team is essential for building cyber resilience. Regular cybersecurity training ensures that employees are aware of potential threats — like phishing and ransomware attacks — and understand best practices for safeguarding sensitive information. By tailoring the training to each specific role, you can ensure that everyone knows how to recognize and respond to potential threats.
Consider cultivating a culture of cybersecurity awareness within the organization. Doing so can encourage employees to take ownership of the role they play in protecting the company’s assets.
Again, since the cyber landscape is ever-changing, it’s important to provide ongoing education and training updates to keep your team informed about new threats and evolving security practices.
5. Establish monitoring and response systems
Implementing monitoring and response systems is important for detecting and responding to cyber threats in real time.
For example, continuous monitoring tools — like security information and event management (SIEM) systems — allow organizations to identify suspicious activity and potential breaches quickly, accelerating the response process. Such systems should be complemented by a well-defined incident response plan that outlines the steps your organization will take when a threat is detected, including communication protocols, contaminant strategies, and recovery procedures.
A dedicated incident response team helps ensure your organization is able to respond effectively to threats. After all, the goal is to minimize the impact of security incidents by quickly detecting and addressing them before they spiral out of control.
6. Conduct regular testing and drills
Make sure your team is prepared to respond to actual threats by conducting tests and running drills regularly to ensure your cyber resilience plans are effective. This includes performing penetration tests and red teaming exercises to simulate attacks and identify vulnerabilities in your systems as well as running tabletop exercises and full-scale simulations of cyber incidents.
These drills help you evaluate the effectiveness of your security controls, incident response plans, and communication strategies. They also provide valuable insights into areas that need improvement and help build confidence in your team’s ability to respond to real-world scenarios.
By regularly testing your resilience measures, you can identify gaps, make necessary adjustments, and ensure that your organization is always prepared to respond to any cyber threat.
7. Review and update policies regularly
Since cyberthreats are constantly evolving, you need to review and update your security policies and procedures regularly. This ensures that your organization’s defenses stay aligned with the latest threats and cybersecurity best practices.
Regular reviews should include assessing the effectiveness of existing policies, making necessary revisions, and incorporating lessons learned from incidents and testing exercises. Additionally, be sure to communicate updates clearly to all employees, proving whatever training may be needed to ensure compliance.
By maintaining up-to-date policies, your organization can adapt to new risks and continue to protect its critical assets despite any new threats that may emerge.
Cyber resilience with Mattermost
As a secure collaboration platform that can be hosted anywhere — including on-premises, in a private or public cloud, and even in air-gapped networks — Mattermost helps security teams achieve cyber resilience. With full source code and API access, Mattermost is fully customizable and can connect with the in-house and SaaS-based tools in your security toolchain, delivering a resilient collaboration hub that can adapt to the strictest security and compliance requirements.
To learn more about how Mattermost can serve as a foundational tool in your cyber resilience strategy, talk to an expert today.
