Why Cyber Security is Integral to Business Resilience

When you talk about business resilience or continuity, it often conjures up images of an old binder gathering dust in the corner – a document filled with plans no one has looked at in years. However, the concept of resilience has long been a cornerstone of strong business strategy. Traditionally, it was framed around continuity — keeping operations running despite disruptions. But today, resilience has evolved into something broader: the ability to anticipate, respond, and adapt to a wide range of challenges.

Cyber security is too often treated as a separate concern from business continuity. Though when a cyber attack or major outage brings your operation to a halt, cyber security becomes a fundamental piece of the resilience puzzle.

Threats aren’t simply hypothetical. Businesses need to shift from thinking ‘what if something happens?’ to ‘what’s our plan when it does?’ This is especially important given the recent Cyber Security Bill 2024 has introduced a Cyber Incident Review Board (CIRB). The CIRB will look to examine the effectiveness of the response to an incident, which means any organisation impacted by an incident will be under review.

There’s a well-known saying: Hope for the best, prepare for the worst, and be unsurprised by anything in between. That philosophy encapsulates how businesses should approach resilience today. If you’ve thought through and tested for the worst-case scenarios, nothing in between will take you by surprise.

Let’s take a closer look at why cyber security is essential to business resilience.

The role of decision-making in crisis response

Decision-making during a crisis is a significant challenge when building cyber resilience. When a major breach or outage happens, who is responsible for what? How do you ensure that the right decisions are made quickly and effectively?

Many organisations struggle in these situations because the critical decisions land in the hands of people who may not have deep technical expertise. Your team’s experts in business continuity may not yet be experts when it comes to data breaches, and that’s an urgent shortcoming to address.

What’s needed is a clear decision-making framework. Organisations must define who is in charge, what authority they have and what playbooks they follow. Without this structure, businesses risk delays, miscommunication and an unnecessarily complicated response.

Strong leadership in crises means defining roles, ensuring expertise, and facilitating informed decisions. With clear playbooks, technical teams provide situational awareness, while executives handle legal, contractual, and communication needs. Effective leaders create clarity, enabling swift, well-informed action.

Testing and training: Moving beyond the theoretical

Having a cyber resilience plan is one thing; knowing how it will perform in a real-world scenario is another. You wouldn’t want to be sailing in the middle of the ocean, have an issue, and be testing your emergency equipment for the first time. The same principle applies to cyber incidents. If businesses don’t run regular scenario training, then when the real crisis hits, panic takes over and processes fall apart.

If the most critical business applications go down, what happens? Who steps in? What are the alternatives? If organisations don’t drill for these situations, they won’t have the muscle memory needed to respond effectively when disaster strikes.

Resilience also means knowing what systems are truly critical to your business. It’s all about understanding how long you can operate without a system before it really starts to hurt.

Take major service outages as an example. When a bank’s payment system fails, customers lose access to their funds and trust in the institution erodes. Businesses must identify these core dependencies and establish contingency plans to keep operations running when, inevitably, something goes wrong.

The future of cyber security in business resilience

Now is the time to build cyber security into every aspect of operations, from decision-making structures to compliance and training. It is a business-wide responsibility, and it is central to resilience in an unpredictable world.

Identifying and addressing weak points through regular testing ensures you’re ready for anything that comes your way. It’s better to invest the time now in testing and planning than to be caught off guard without the right framework or people in place. So, revisit that playbook, prioritise testing, and fortify your business for the future.

Listen to Fred Thiele’s interview with KBKast about the role of cyber security in business resilience.

Read more about Slipstream Cyber’s services.