The Disruption Landscape

The organizations are at war. This war is not just about gaining market share; it is about survival. It is about being able to defend its boundaryless perimeter from the incessant, sophisticated cyberattacks, so that business operations can be delivered without any dip in customer experience parameters.
A recent 2025 survey by the World Economic Forum found that the number of small organizations that believe their cyber resilience is inadequate has increased sevenfold since 2022, to the extent that 71% cyber leaders believe that small organizations have already reached a critical tipping point where they can no longer adequately secure themselves against the growing complexity of cyber risks. By contrast, the share of large organizations reporting insufficient cyber resilience has nearly halved. The attackers are likely to notice the increasing cyber inequity between large and small organizations and target the less mature, smaller, critical supplier firms as an intrusion vector, thereby circumventing the defenses of the larger organizations. It’s not surprising that over half of large organizations (54%) identified supply chain challenges as the biggest barrier to achieving cyber resilience. Economies of scale and ease of doing business will not be ruled out from the adversarial cyber-attack strategy.
The complexity of cybersecurity does not differentiate organizations based on their revenue. Organizations are increasingly challenged by escalating geopolitical tensions, opaque supply chain risks, vulnerabilities introduced by the rapid adoption of new technologies, AI-enhanced cybercrime tactics, ever-widening cyber skill gaps, and the burden of meeting regulatory requirements. The leaders of organizations must adopt a security-first mindset and invest in the organization’s capabilities to detect, protect, respond to, and recover from cyber incidents targeting its critical assets, also known as its crown jewels.
 

The Pillars of 𝑚𝑢𝑟ū𝑛𝑎 (Resilience)

While cyber regulations are effective in reducing an organization’s cyber risks, resilience requires not only meeting but exceeding regulatory demands, continuous vigilance, and planning. Cyber resilience acknowledges that no system is entirely secure and facilitates proactive preparation for worst-case scenarios that impact the organization’s business goals and objectives.

Cyber resilience is not a one-time, 'tick the box' checklist activity. Instead, it’s a collaborative, structured, and tailored approach undertaken by organizations to anticipate, plan, withstand, and recover effectively from cyber incidents; continuously evolving to enhance the cyber resilience posture by adopting ‘resilience by design’ and ‘culture of resilience’ principles. Organizations should establish a Resilience Framework encompassing:

1. Governanace

 Establishment of a resilience policy and governance structure

2. Planning:

Organizations need to proactively act on the basis that significant incidents will occur and disrupt their business operations and services. Led from the top, organizations need to collaborate with their third parties and leaders of all internal business and support functions to:

  • Conduct a business impact assessment to identify the business services / products, associated interdependencies, and recovery parameters like MTPD and MTDL.
  • Identify single points of failure and threats that could cause disruption to urgent activities, and take measures to mitigate the risk. Conduct threat intelligence analysis.
  • Identify and assess all possible continuity options and workarounds
  • Develop / Update BCP, Continuity of Operations Plan, Crisis Management Plan, Disaster Recovery Plan, and Incident Management Plan. 

3. Validation:

Develop an exercise program comprising desktop exercises, simulation, and technical tests to validate the effectiveness of resilience strategy, plans, and staff roles and responsibilities.

4. People and Culture:

Establish competence and capability via role-based training, awareness sessions, and campaigns. Positively influence a culture of resilience through external certifications and alignment with global standards, such as ISO 22301. 

5. Evolve: 

Continuously improving resilience posture via periodic reviews and audits, maturity assessments, KPI based resilience tracking and reporting, and adopting technology for predictive analytics and monitoring.

According to the recent global cybersecurity outlook survey by the World Economic Forum, in 62% of high-resilience organizations, board members receive regular updates on recent cyber incidents, trends, vulnerabilities, and risk predictions from internal or external third parties; this is in stark contrast to only 29% in low-resilience organizations. An early incident detection and response mechanism can be a crucial factor in an organization's survival. In a modern enterprise, cyber and operational resilience are converging disciplines. Principles such as leadership ownership, risk-informed decisions, integrated detection, protection, and recovery mechanisms, and adaptation through learning enable organizations to evolve from reactive recovery to adaptive resilience — a proactive ability to thrive amidst constant disruption.