Cyber threats are frequent, unpredictable, and indiscriminate—affecting organizations of every size and industry. For any organization, a cyber incident is a matter of “when,” not “if”. As such, businesses must be able to prepare for, respond to, and recover from incidents, and must continually refine these capabilities to stay ahead.
This is where developing and practicing cyber resilience as an element of your organization’s security operations strategy can make a major difference.
What is Cyber Resilience?
Cyber resilience refers to an organization’s ability to prepare for, respond to, and recover from cyber attacks, incidents, data breaches, and other events that may disrupt normal operations, such as system outages or unexpected staff shortages.
Cyber resilience moves beyond traditional cybersecurity strategies built around attack detection and prevention to focusing instead on business continuity: ensuring an organization can maintain and/or restore operations during and after an unexpected disruption.
Key components of cyber resiliency include:
- Cybersecurity foundations, including the people, processes, and technologies involved in securing an organization
- Risk management measures, through the use of policies, processes, and technology such as vulnerability management, identity and access management (IAM) best practices, and integration of threat intelligence.
- Monitoring and detection capabilities for visibility, threat detection, and threat response within the IT environment
- Business continuity, or the ability to maintain viable operations during and after an incident
- Incident response and recovery, including the planning, personnel, and procedures needed to minimize impact and get business operations up- and -running swiftly post-incident
Building cyber resilience means taking a more comprehensive approach than just installing preventative technology. A cyber resilience strategy should consider threat prevention, business continuity, incident recovery, and be predicated on adaptability with a focus on increasing cyber maturity.
The Six Pillars of Cyber Resilience
Incorporating a cyber resilience strategy into your organization’s cybersecurity operations takes time and requires a diligent process. One such approach is to align it to the NIST CSF 2.0 Framework, which contains six functions: identify, protect, detect, respond, recover, and govern. While every organization contains their own unique challenges, risk points, and internal goals and limitations, cyber resilience strategies fit neatly into these core NIST functions, offering a strong baseline for organizations to initially measure their own resiliency.
Like the NIST CSF 2.0 framework, the main pillars of a cyber resilience framework should be seen as an ongoing lifecycle, where multiple stages can be conducted concurrently.
The main pillars of cyber resilience are:
1. Identify: This involves identifying both existing cyber risk points within the IT and security environment, and setting a baseline for the amount of cyber risk your business is willing to accept. Not every vulnerability can be immediately remediated, and not every new technology can be evaluated and secured under ideal conditions, so your organization should discover and assess what is most important to protect, what security gaps exist, and what the plan is to increase resilience.
2. Protect: This is the foundation of cyber resilience, focused on implementing robust security measures – such as endpoint protection, access controls, environment monitoring, and more – to protect your organization’s most critical assets, applications, and operations from threat actors and possible disruption.
3. Detect: Being able to detect threats accurately and swiftly is the difference between stopping a threat and having to respond to a full-scale incident. Systems like endpoint detection and response (EDR), and managed detection and response (MDR), can integrate into your organization’s wider network and technologies, and provide real-time monitoring, detection, and response actions.
4. Respond: Your organization needs to be able to respond swiftly and thoroughly to threats and potential incidents in order to maintain resiliency and decrease the risk of disruption to business operations. While certain detection and response solutions, such as EDR and MDR, will have automated alert investigation response capabilities (e.g. host isolation, process termination, file deletion), this is where internal security teams and/or external incident response (IR) providers are put to work by helping your organizations disrupt the threat and minimize damage.
5. Recovery and Continuous Improvement: This is the post-mortem stage of an incident, where key stakeholders work to not only restore business operations as quickly as possible with minimum disruption, but also gather analysis on what occurred and what steps need to be taken in the “protect” and “detect” stage of the lifecycle, to prevent a similar incident from occurring in the future.
6. Governance: Strong cybersecurity doesn’t happen with technology alone. Establishing an overall cyber risk management strategy with expectations, policies, and continual improvement, monitoring, and communication actions will increase your cyber resilience over time, while helping your organization find and close operational and security gaps.
The Value of Having a Cyber Resilience Strategy
The threat landscape is constantly evolving, and the past few years have seen shifts and innovations from threat actors that put organizations more at risk. According to The State of Cybersecurity: 2025 Trends Report, 70% of organizations experienced at least one significant cyber attack within the past 12 months, with malware, business email compromise (BEC), and ransomware leading as the top attack types identified in those incidents. Additionally, 64% of those significant cyber attacks led to a loss of productivity lasting at least three months. Threat actors are rapidly adapting to the changes organizations are implementing and experiencing in their own environments (i.e. user-centric perimeters, reliance on the cloud, hybrid-work models, sprawling attack surfaces), finding new holes in these defenses and operational workflows to launch attacks and disrupt businesses.
These points make cyber resilience even more important, and there are a few key advantages for organizations who work to put a strong cyber resilience strategy in place. These advantages include:
- The meeting of compliance requirements, which in turn can prevent potential fines or legal actions post-incident.
- A competitive advantage, making your organization more attractive to customers, partners, and investors through a continued commitment to cybersecurity.
- Cost savings, as it’s considerably more affordable to invest in preventative cybersecurity measures than suffer the costs of a data breach, which can include incident response fees, legal fees, compliance fines, reputation damage, stock or company valuation issues, and more.
- Strategic flexibility, which allows your organization to adapt to new threats and technologies. This agility is critical in a changing digital landscape.
How To Build Cyber Resilience at Your Organization
Building cyber resilience won’t happen overnight, and should be viewed as an ongoing process that is refined as your organization’s business and security goals mature, and as the threat landscape changes. What worked yesterday might not work tomorrow, so this process will need to be re-visited and scrutinized regularly to maintain it’s effectiveness within your organization and IT environment.
Steps to building a cyber resilience strategy are:
1. Define Your Strategy. Organizations must first understand what assets they want to protect, what vulnerabilities exist within their environment, and what short- and long-term goals they hope to achieve. This should include both the development of a strategy to increase resilience, and a consensus on what cyber risk the business is willing to accept. This step, within itself, is an entire process that is critical to the success of subsequent steps.
Learn more about how to assess your current cyber resilience state and better define your strategy.
2. Enact Robust Security Controls. From securing your organizations’ endpoints through the use of endpoint security solutions, to implementing strong identity and access management best practices (e.g. multi-factor authentication), this is the most involved step of the process, where your organization is implementing, optimizing, hardening, and advancing a wide swath of security tools to harden your attack surface.
3. Implement Security Awareness Training. As IT perimeters are increasingly defined by users and their access, and threat actors are targeting human risk points within environments – phishing and compromised credentials are the leading root point of compromise in BEC cases – training employees and users to reduce the human risk attack surface is key to both cyber resiliency and building a culture of security.
Learn about the key tenants of a strong security awareness training program.
4. Leverage both technology and human expertise to advance your security goals. Neither technology nor humans alone can eliminate risk. But by combining the two, your organization can continually build resiliency, increase your security maturity, and respond to threats fast and accurately, helping reduce risk.
See how Arctic Wolf’s blend of proactive and reactive security, backed by human expertise, reduces attack likelihood and impact by upwards of 90%.
5. Implement an Incident Response (IR) Plan and Obtain an Incident Response Retainer. Because incidents occur at such an alarming rate, part of cyber resilience means having all your pieces in place for if/when one occurs. By building out a robust IR plan and obtaining an IR retainer, your organization is not only taking proactive steps to harden your attack surface, but is also ensuring that if an incident occurs, you’ll be able to respond quickly, minimize damage, and restore operations, fast.
Learn more about the value of IR retainers.
Want to learn more?
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See how to manage your cyber risk, map your security posture against industry-standard frameworks, and create an incident response plan with Arctic Wolf Cyber Jumpstart.
