What is Cyber Resiliency?
Cyber Resiliency Definition: An organization’s capacity to maintain operations under cyberattack and quickly recover from disruptions.
Understanding Cyber Resiliency
Cyber Resiliency acknowledges an uncomfortable truth: despite our best security efforts, breaches will eventually occur. Rather than focusing exclusively on prevention, resilient organizations design systems and processes that can withstand attacks, continue functioning during incidents, and recover quickly afterward. This approach combines technical measures like redundant systems, offline backups, and segmented networks with organizational capabilities like cross-trained personnel, well-practiced incident response, and business continuity planning. Resilient architectures follow principles like zero trust, least functionality, and defense in depth, while emphasizing diversity (avoiding monocultures that create single points of failure) and adaptability to changing threats. Even small improvements in resiliency can dramatically reduce business impact—for example, being able to restore critical systems in hours rather than days, or maintaining core customer service functions during an incident. Organizations building cyber resiliency typically assess their critical functions, identify dependencies and single points of failure, then systematically address these vulnerabilities through both technical and procedural controls.