Cyber Resilience: Could Your Organisation Confidently Answer These Five Questions?

A straightforward way to assess your level of cyber resilience is to ask yourself five critical questions. Could your organisation confidently answer "Yes" to all of them?

1. Do You Know Your Critical Systems?

You cannot protect what you do not understand.

Many organisations have large and complex IT environments that have evolved over time. As a result, critical systems, sensitive data repositories, and business critical applications are often poorly documented or lack clear ownership and accountability.

Knowing your critical systems means identifying the systems, data, processes, and services that are essential to business operations. Organisations should also understand what services are required to ensure the continued provision of mission critical services for its clients and customers.

Mission critical systems could have many interdependencies on other systems that sit in the back end, or even on third party systems. Knowing how all the pieces fit together can help reduce the maximum tolerable period of disruption to acceptable levels.

Identifying the most mission critical systems for your business and understanding how they interact with other parts of your organisation and infrastructure can help get systems back online in a much more effective manner, limiting the impact to your customer base.

2. Have You Tested Your Incident Response & Business Continuity Plans?

Having an incident response plan and a business continuity plan is a great starting point, but have you evaluated how they work and complement each other in reality? Effective plans should act as a framework to address severe but plausible operational disruptions, which can be implemented across multiple scenarios, which maintain critical business services, minimise disruption, and enable a rapid, controlled recovery when an incident occurs.

Many organisations have detailed incident response and business continuity procedures documented in policies and playbooks, yet those plans are rarely exercised under realistic conditions. When a significant incident occurs, assumptions made during planning can quickly unravel under pressure.

Regular tabletop exercises, technical simulations, and crisis management rehearsals help identify gaps before potential threat actors may. These exercises allow teams to clarify roles & responsibilities, improve communication flows, and build confidence in decision-making processes across the entire organisation.

Testing should not be viewed as a compliance exercise. It is an opportunity to strengthen organisational readiness and resilience to ensure that, when an incident occurs, the response is coordinated, efficient, and effective.

3. Are Third Parties Assessed?

Modern organisations rely heavily on suppliers, partners, managed service providers, and cloud platforms. While these relationships create business value, they also introduce additional cyber risk. Year on year supply chain risk is increasing, and can be the door into your organisation that you were not aware was ajar.

Attackers increasingly target third parties as a route into larger organisations, exploiting weaker security controls within the supply chain. It takes just one vulnerable vendor to undermine a highly mature security programme.

Effective cyber resilience requires ongoing assessment of third-party security practices. This includes due diligence during onboarding, regular security reviews, contractual security requirements, and continuous monitoring where appropriate.

Organisations should have a clear understanding of which suppliers have access to sensitive information or critical systems and ensure that those relationships are managed proportionately to the level of risk they present.

4. Is OT Visibility in Place?

For organisations operating industrial environments, manufacturing facilities, utilities, or critical infrastructure, OT security has become a board level concern.

Historically, operational technology networks were isolated from traditional IT systems. Today, increasing connectivity, digital transformation initiatives, and remote access requirements have blurred these boundaries, creating new opportunities for threat actors to exploit.

A lack of visibility into OT environments can leave organisations unaware of vulnerable devices, unauthorised changes, or emerging threats. Without accurate asset inventories and monitoring capabilities, detecting, and responding to incidents becomes significantly more challenging.

Attacks on the Ukraine power grid infrastructure by state actors, which used spear-phishing to gain initial access via the IT network and deploy malware, then moving laterally into the OT network. Attackers used legitimate remote administration tools to manipulate SCADA systems, disconnect substations have shown how compromised industrial control systems can directly impact essential services.

These events reinforce a critical lesson for business leaders: without effective visibility into OT assets, strong network segregation, and well-rehearsed response plans, cyber incidents can quickly escalate into operational disruption, affecting customers, supply chains, regulatory obligations, and organisational reputation. Cyber resilience in OT is therefore not just a technical requirement, but a fundamental component of business continuity and operational resilience.

5. Are Executives Involved?

Cyber resilience is not solely an IT or security issue. It is a business issue.

Executive leadership plays a crucial role in shaping organisational resilience and has overall accountability for security management. Strategic decisions relating to risk appetite, investment, crisis communications, and recovery priorities all require active engagement from senior stakeholders.

The most resilient organisations ensure that executives understand the cyber risks facing the business and participate in incident response exercises. This enables leaders to make informed decisions during a crisis and reinforces accountability across the organisation.

When cyber resilience is embedded into business strategy, security moves beyond technical controls and becomes part of the organisational culture. The right culture from the top spreads across the entire workforce, and having that top level buy in encourages everyone to play their part.

However, it is critically important that business leaders are getting the right messaging from the rest of the organisation. Effective cyber and operational resilience reporting should enable executives to understand the organisation's ability to maintain critical services during disruption. Rather than focusing solely on technical security metrics, reporting should provide a clear view of business risks, critical service dependencies, third-party exposure, OT resilience, and recovery capabilities. The most effective board reports can translate cyber risks into operational and commercial outcomes, allowing leaders to make informed decisions about investment, risk appetite, and resilience priorities before an incident occurs.

Resilience Is More Than Security

Cyber resilience is not measured by the number of security tools deployed or the absence of incidents. It is defined by an organisation's ability to continue delivering critical services when disruption occurs.

If your organisation cannot confidently answer "Yes" to these five questions, there may be gaps that need addressing. Understanding critical assets, validating incident response and business continuity capabilities, managing third-party risk, improving OT visibility, and engaging executive leadership are all essential components of a resilient security posture.

In a rapidly evolving threat landscape, resilience is no longer a competitive advantage. It is a business necessity. The organisations best prepared for the future will not be those that never experience a cyber incident, but those that can respond, recover quickly, and emerge stronger through lessons learned, when one inevitably occurs.

Organisations do not need to answer every question perfectly, but they should be able to answer them confidently. Uncertainty around critical assets, response capabilities, third-party dependencies, OT environments, or executive accountability often indicates where resilience improvements should be prioritised. The most resilient organisations are not those that avoid every incident, but those that understand their risks, prepare effectively, and can continue delivering critical services when disruption occurs.