Is Defense Enough to Stop Attackers –Should You Spend More Time Focused on Resilience?

Critical Points for a Resilience-First Mindset -Speed and Coordination are Critical in Incident Response

In resilience, speed is everything. The faster we can detect, contain, and respond to an incident, the more we protect the organization from prolonged downtime, financial impact, and potential reputational harm. But speed without coordination won’t work. This is why resilience requires a coordinated incident response plan that involves every key player across departments—from IT to HR to the executive suite. Each team member should understand their role and how they contribute to the overall response. Resilience is a shared responsibility, and it’s our job to ensure the entire team is trained and ready to act in sync.

Preparation is the Backbone of Resilience

It’s simple: resilient organizations are prepared organizations. And preparation means creating robust, actionable plans and testing them frequently. This includes having secure data backups that are routinely tested, regular tabletop exercises to walk teams through response scenarios, and ongoing training for everyone involved. Think of preparation as building “muscle memory” for the team to respond naturally, effectively, and quickly when an event occurs.

Three Actions to Take Right Now

Here are three specific steps you can take to build resilience into your cybersecurity approach starting today

Review and Update Your Incident Response Plan

Set time aside to review your current incident response plan and ask these critical questions: Are the right people involved? Do we have clear protocols for communication and containment? Have we included every department that might need to respond? If you don’t already have these aspects in place, prioritize them. This clarity is essential to a coordinated, quick response.

Schedule Regular Tabletop Exercises

Start planning regular tabletop exercises, ideally twice a year, to simulate cyber incidents. Each simulation should involve a cross-functional team, including IT, PR, legal, and executive members, who can practice their roles in a controlled environment. These exercises are the best way to reveal weaknesses in the plan and ensure every participant knows their part. This preparation will build team confidence and foster a more resilient response culture.

Establish Backup and Recovery Protocols

Make sure that you have secure, reliable, and regularly tested backups. Establish a schedule to review and test these backups. During a ransomware attack, for instance, these backups might be your saving grace for recovery, allowing you to sidestep paying a ransom or losing critical data. Remember, an untested backup isn’t reliable—testing it is vital.

Moving Forward

By shifting our focus from pure defense to resilience, we acknowledge that breaches may be inevitable, but significant damage doesn’t have to be.

As CISOs, this is our opportunity to protect our organizations in a proactive, adaptable, and sustainable way. So, let’s lead this shift confidently—starting with the actions above. In the end, a resilient organization isn’t just more secure; it’s more agile, trustworthy, and ready for whatever comes next.

FAQ-5 Questions to help you on your journey

What specific metrics or benchmarks indicate that an organization has achieved sufficient resilience?

Effective resilience is measured through a combination of recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO), which determine how quickly and to what point data can be recovered after an incident. Additional benchmarks include incident detection time (mean time to detect, or MTTD), response time (mean time to respond, or MTTR), and mean time to recover after an incident. Regularly tracking these metrics provides a clear view of resilience readiness. An annual review of these benchmarks can help refine processes and ensure that response capabilities are up to date with evolving threats.

How can organizations ensure effective coordination across departments during a real cyber incident?

Coordination requires a well-defined incident response protocol that specifies each department's role and the precise steps in a unified response plan. Organizations can build coordination by conducting tabletop exercises with representatives from key areas such as IT, legal, PR, HR, and executive leadership. Using a communication tool that all teams can access during incidents ensures everyone stays informed in real time. Clear guidelines and a point person for each team foster alignment, reduce confusion, and create a cohesive response.

What are the primary barriers to shifting from a defense-first to a resilience-first mindset, and how can they be overcome?

Key barriers include budget constraints, cultural resistance, and a lack of skilled personnel trained in resilience-focused strategies. To overcome these, CISOs can present resilience as a cost-saving measure in the long term, emphasizing that rapid recovery can significantly reduce costs from lost productivity, data loss, and reputational damage. Introducing resilience gradually, starting with areas where it is easiest to demonstrate its value, can build momentum and shift the cultural mindset. Investing in training programs and promoting the importance of resilience among all employees can help develop the necessary skills across the organization.

How should resilience efforts be balanced with ongoing investments in traditional cybersecurity defenses?

A balanced approach involves combining robust defenses with resilience measures that complement each other. Organizations should assess which defensive tools contribute to resilience—such as endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools that offer insights into incidents. A recommended approach is to allocate resources according to a cybersecurity maturity model, ensuring that as an organization’s foundational defenses become stronger, a portion of the budget is gradually shifted toward resilience activities, such as incident response planning, backup testing, and employee training.

How can CISOs effectively communicate the value of resilience to executive stakeholders, particularly those focused on cost savings?

CISOs can frame resilience as a way to minimize the financial and operational impacts of inevitable cyber incidents, using real-world case studies and metrics to illustrate cost savings in faster recovery and reduced business interruption. Highlighting how resilience can protect the company’s reputation—often a key concern for executives—by preventing prolonged disruptions and data loss can also be persuasive. Quantifying the potential costs of downtime and comparing them to the costs of resilience measures helps make a compelling financial argument. Ultimately, showing resilience as a means of supporting business continuity can gain executive buy-in by aligning security efforts with core business priorities.