Reaching enterprise level resilience

The concept of resilience for organisations isn’t new but its meaning has had to change significantly with a notable rise in Cyber security incidents. Traditionally, companies focused on operational resilience, making sure that core functions and systems remained available. This has always been a key focus for IT operations, disaster recovery and business continuity strategies.

Enterprise resilience goes far beyond the IT department, it relies on an organisation’s ability to anticipate and deal with disruptions, not just at a technical level. Be it a compromised supply chain, a data breach, or ransomware attack, organisations need to respond in ways that protect their operation, brand / reputation, and long-term success.

1. Cyber threats are business threats

Cyber security is no longer solely a technical issue, organisations are realising that Cyber threats can impact the entire operation. IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach report (Cost of a data breach 2024 | IBM) says that the average breach in 2024 cost $4.9 million: a 10% increase over last year and the highest total ever.

Beyond financial implications, data breaches can damage an organisations’ reputation, have a severe negative impact on customer trust, lead to regulatory scrutiny and decrease investor confidence.

Enterprise resilience is now a strategic imperative, not just about protecting IT assets, but safeguarding an organisations’ ability to operate and survive. To do this effectively, organisations need to align investments made into Cyber and enterprise resilience to make sure they remain within their risk appetite.

2. Why is enterprise resilience different?

Operational resilience focuses on uptime and the ability to recover systems, enterprise resilience covers:

• Strategic alignment: it aligns resilience planning with business goals and priorities
• Cross-functional: involving people from different areas of a business e.g., legal, HR, c-suite
• Focus on people: communication, training, crisis decision making need to be prioritised
• Digital security: Cyber attacks are now one of the top threats to an organisation’s continuity

Organisations who have strong enterprise resilience assume that Cyber incidents will happen, and focus on limiting their impact and maintaining core operations.

3. Considerations for embedding enterprise resilience

There are lots of things to consider when strengthening the enterprise resilience of an organisation:

• Executive ownership and culture: enterprise resilience needs to start at the top. Board-level understanding and buy-in are critical. Culture plays a key part here, organisations need to build an environment where Cyber security is seen and understood to be a shared responsibility between all employees.
• Scenario planning and wargaming: simulated incident response activities, especially for Cyber attack scenarios, should involve business leadership, legal, comms, and operations teams – not just IT. Realistic role-based exercises help uncover areas for improvement and help teams become more prepared.
• Risk appetite and resilience metrics: as well as uptime metrics, organisations need to measure their ability to maintain critical services during a Cyber incident. This means making sure that minimum viable operations are defined, understanding dependencies and aligning incident responses to the organisation’s risk appetite.
• Integrated crisis management: during a Cyber incident, technical fixes are only part of the response. Clear internal communications, stakeholder engagement, and public messaging are critical to maintaining continuity and customer trust.
• Regulatory compliance and transparency: with increasing regulations e.g., NIS2, DORA, (The UK Cybersecurity and Resilience Bill – a different approach to NIS2 or a British sister act? | DLA Piper) being resilient means being able to demonstrate readiness to respond within mandated timeframes and provide evidence of due-diligence post-incident.

In a world where Cyber incidents are all too frequent, complex and high-impact, enterprise resilience is a strategic advantage.

Organisations that invest in cross-functional preparedness, embed resilience into their culture, and treat enterprise resilience as a board-level priority will be better positioned to continue operating successfully after disruption. They can recover faster, preserve brand trust and integrity, and have an advantage over competitors that don’t invest in resilience.

Resilience needs to be embedded into digital transformation initiatives, not considered as a nice-to-have. The winners in this new era will be those who not only recover well from disruption, but move continue moving forwards.

If you would like to speak to Adam Hodgkins regarding this cyber insight, send your enquiry to contact@masonadvisory.com

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