For many security leaders today, it can feel like they are working against a stacked deck.

Understaffed and stressed security teams, the prospect of AI making cybercrime more prevalent and efficient and a rapidly changing regulatory landscape are just three pressing factors to incorporate into an organization’s security strategy.

C-Suite leaders can no longer look at cybersecurity as something that is handled in a silo, with individual threats that only require sufficient focus to survive one-off attacks. Instead, they need to muster people, processes and technology to achieve cyber resilience.

Cyber resilience refers to an organization’s ability to anticipate, respond to, and recover from cyber attacks while continuing to operate effectively. It encompasses a comprehensive set of strategies, processes, and technologies that mitigate the impact of cyber incidents and enable rapid and efficient recovery.

Conceptually, this may seem simple and straightforward enough. But, why has it taken so long to make holistic resilience strategies mainstream? Historically, conversations around cybersecurity have been reactive and tactical. ‘How did the breach happen?’ ‘How much is it going to cost to remediate?’ ‘How are we going to prevent this from happening again?’ ‘Does our insurance cover it?’ and, of course, ‘Whose fault was it?’.

But a sea change is underway. Leaders are recognizing that a smoothly operating organization requires real cybersecurity that can anticipate, adapt, and overcome. Organizations can no longer wait for disaster to strike or, when it does, count on insurance to prop them up. IBM reports that the average cost of a data breach has reached $4.45 million in 2023.

Time is the new currency in cybersecurity. And time can work both for and against organizations. Time is critical given the costs of preventing a breach is far smaller than that of recovering from a breach. The one surefire method of reducing the costs of a breach is faster incident response.

Given the pressing challenges, cyber resilience allows CISOs not only to react but to shift to a strategic proactive approach.

This briefing report gives CISOs practical guidance on how to begin achieving cyber resilience within their organizations.