What is cyber resilience?

Cyber resilience is a concept that brings business continuity, information systems security and organizational resilience together. It describes the ability to continue delivering intended outcomes despite experiencing challenging cyber events, such as cyberattacks, natural disasters or economic slumps. A measured level of information security proficiency and resilience affects how well an organization can continue business operations with little to no downtime.

Modern cyberthreats present new challenges, creating an environment where traditional security measures alone are insufficient. Organizations face sophisticated adversaries who use advanced technologies and techniques to cause disruptions. Threat actors and hackers increasingly exploit human vulnerabilities and system weaknesses rather than relying on traditional automated attack methods.

According to the 2025 Cost of a Data Breach Report from IBM and the Ponemon Institute, global breach costs decreased to USD 4.44 million on average. However, US organizations faced record-high costs at USD 10.22 million per incident. Despite these costs, 49% of breached organizations plan to increase security investments.

Enterprises must build effective cyber resilience through a risk-based strategy and coordinate initiatives to support it. A collaborative approach led by executives extends across the organizational ecosystem, reaching partners, supply chain participants and customers. It must proactively manage risks, threats, vulnerabilities and the effects on critical information and supporting assets, while also strengthening overall preparedness.

Successful cyber resilience also involves governance, risk management, an understanding of data ownership and incident management. Assessing these characteristics also demands experience and judgment.

Furthermore, an organization must also balance cyber risks against attainable opportunities and competitive advantages. It must consider whether cost-effective prevention is viable and whether it can achieve rapid detection and correction with a strong short-term effect on cyber resilience.

To accomplish this goal, an enterprise must find the right balance between three types of controls: preventive, detective and corrective. These controls prevent, detect and correct incidents that threaten an organization’s cyber resilience.

A cyber resilience strategy helps organizations achieve the following benefits:

• Mitigate financial loss

• Reduce operational damage

• Gain customer trust and business

• Increase competitive advantage

• Ensure business continuity

Financial loss from successful attacks might lead to a loss of confidence from company stakeholders, such as shareholders, investors, employees and customers.

The financial stakes are substantial. The IBM 2025 Cost of a Data Breach Report revealed that organizations with extensive artificial intelligence (AI) use in security operations saved an average of USD 1.9 million in breach costs. These enterprises also reduced the breach lifecycle by 80 days compared to those organizations without these solutions. However, organizations experiencing AI-related incidents without proper access controls faced higher costs, highlighting the need for governed cyber resilience strategies.

Cyber incidents can severely impact an organization's reputation and customer confidence. A robust cyber resilience framework helps organizations respond quickly and transparently to incidents, minimizing long-term reputational harm and maintaining stakeholder trust.

To attract customers and gain their business, some organizations comply with international management standards, such as ISO/IEC 27001 provided by the International Organization for Standardization. ISO/IEC 27001 provides conditions for an information security management system (ISMS) to manage asset security like employee details, financial information, intellectual property or third-party entrusted information.

In the US, companies might seek certification with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS), a prerequisite for processing payments (for example, with credit cards).

Cyber resilience provides organizations with a competitive advantage over companies without it. Enterprises that develop structured approaches (for example, threat intelligence programs) along with standardized best practices create effective operations.

Similarly, organizations enhance their operational effectiveness by developing management systems for cyber resilience. Therefore, these systems contribute significant value to their customers and create sustainable business advantages.

Organizations with a robust cyber resilience plan can maintain critical operations even during security incidents, minimizing downtime and ensuring continuous service delivery to customers and stakeholders.

Organizations develop cyber resilience by adopting proven standardized practices, such as the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (NIST CSF).

By incorporating the ITIL lifecycle stages, organizations can build a strong cyber resilience strategy that enables proactive cyber risk management and supports ongoing business operations. This method also fosters collaboration throughout the organization by involving all relevant stakeholders.

These five ITIL lifecycle stages are:

1. Service strategy: Based on the organization’s objectives, this phase identifies critical assets, such as information, systems and services, that matter most to it and its stakeholders. It also includes identifying vulnerabilities and the risks that they face.
2. Service design: Organizations select the management system’s appropriate and proportionate controls, procedures and training to prevent harm to critical assets (where practical to do so). The design phase also identifies who has what authority to decide and act.
3. Service transition: Organizations deploy and test the designed controls, procedures and training in their operational environment. This transition phase establishes clear governance by identifying decision-making authority and defining who has the responsibility to act when threats emerge.
4. Service operation: Operations teams monitor, detect and manage cyber events and incidents, including continual control testing to ensure effectiveness, efficiency and consistency.
5. Continual service improvement: Organizations must practice adaptability to protect an ever-changing threat environment. As they recover from incidents, they must learn from the experiences, modifying their procedures, training, design and strategy, as needed.

NIST provides comprehensive guidance and best practices that private sector organizations can follow to improve information security and cybersecurity risk management.

The framework consists of six core functions:

1. Govern: Establish cybersecurity governance and risk mitigation policies that inform and prioritize cybersecurity activities, enabling risk-informed decision-making across the enterprise.
2. Identify: Develop a comprehensive understanding of the most critical assets and resources to protect against cyberattacks effectively. This function encompasses asset management, business environment evaluation, governance frameworks, risk assessment and supply chain risk management.
3. Protect: Implement appropriate technical and physical security controls to develop safeguards for critical infrastructure protection. Key areas include security awareness and training, data security, data protection processes, maintenance and protective technology.
4. Detect: Deploy measures that provide alerts about cybersecurity events and evolving threats. Detection categories encompass anomaly and event identification, continuous security monitoring and the establishment of robust detection processes.
5. Respond: Ensure appropriate response capabilities for cyberattacks and other cybersecurity events. This strategy includes response planning, stakeholder communications, incident analysis, threat mitigation and process improvements.
6. Recover: Implement recovery activities and plans for cyber resilience to ensure business continuity following cyberattacks, security breaches or other cybersecurity events. This approach involves developing and implementing plans and procedures to recover systems, data and services, as well as learning from the incident to improve future resilience. 

The following tools allow organizations to withstand and recover from cyberattacks, minimize disruptions and maintain business operations:

• Security information and event management (SIEM): SIEM systems provide centralized logging capabilities and conduct real-time analysis of security events across the organization's entire IT infrastructure.

• Identity and access management (IAM): IAM solutions offer comprehensive user authentication and access controls that ensure only authorized personnel can access critical systems and data.

• Zero-trust architecture: A zero-trust security model operates on the principle of assuming no implicit trust, and it continuously validates access requests, regardless of user location or device.

• Cloud security platforms: These specialized tools provide protection designed explicitly for cloud-based assets and workloads across hybrid and multicloud environments.

• Disaster recovery (DR) solutions: These systems provide automated backup and disaster recovery capabilities for critical data and applications, ensuring rapid restoration of operations following incidents like ransomware attacks.

• Continuous monitoring platforms: These solutions provide real-time visibility into security posture and threat landscape, enabling proactive threat management and risk assessment.

• Cyberattack simulation tools: These tools simulate realistic attack scenarios to assess organizational preparedness, train teams and identify gaps in incident response plans.

Artificial intelligence and generative AI present both opportunities and risks for cyber resilience. While AI-powered security tools can enhance threat detection and response capabilities, ungoverned AI systems create new vulnerabilities that attackers can exploit. Generative AI tools also introduce unique challenges around data governance and potential misuse.

Findings from the 2025 Cost of a Data Breach Report found that 97% of organizations with AI-related security incidents lacked proper AI access controls. Moreover, 63% of organizations have no AI governance policies to manage AI deployment or prevent unauthorized AI usage.

Organizations with strategic AI implementation in security operations demonstrate significant cost savings and faster data breach containment compared to those enterprises without these solutions. However, success requires balanced adoption that prioritizes security governance alongside innovation.

Key considerations include implementing strong controls for nonhuman identities, adopting phishing-resistant authentication methods like passkeys, and integrating cybersecurity governance into AI deployment strategies from the outset. This approach ensures that AI serves as a strengthening mechanism for cyber resilience rather than creating excessive security debt.

Cyber resilience strategies continue to evolve as new technologies create both security opportunities and threats. Extended detection and response (XDR) platforms are maturing to deliver integrated threat detection across multiple security layers, while AI-powered threat detection systems advance to identify sophisticated attack patterns that traditional tools miss. Rather than replacing human expertise, AI is amplifying it.

In the IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV) study, Cybersecurity 2028, 65% of executives surveyed report that AI and automation are creating more productive environments for their IT and security teams. And 62% said that they are already seeing significant returns from integrated AI capabilities.

Quantum computing will also fundamentally change cybersecurity by making current encryption methods inadequate. However, it will also enable quantum-safe cryptography and quantum key distribution for enhanced security.

Sustaining cyber resilience requires continuous adaptation, strategic investment and efforts to optimize the integration of emerging technologies while maintaining core security principles.