Cyber resilience: A key business strategy for leaders

Cybersecurity touches everything from product development to customer trust, board governance, and supply chain integrity. This means cyber resilience is no longer just a technical skill—it’s a critical part of business strategy for every leader. 

Matt Lloyd Davies, cybersecurity Author and researcher at Pluralsight, explains how to strengthen your cybersecurity stance and build resilience for business success.

Watch the on-demand webinar.

“Cyber resilience is your organization's ability to continue operating when things go wrong. It's not just about bouncing back either. It's about absorbing the hit in the first place, adapting to new realities, and staying in motion without losing the trust of your customers, partners, or people,” says Matt.

“And that means resilience isn't just a function of how good our technical controls are, it's a function of leadership clarity, culture, investment choices, and decision-making under pressure. It's a whole system capability, not a side program.”

Cyber resilience can mean the difference between a minor incident and a full-blown crisis. Here’s how to build your organization’s cyber resilience to maintain business continuity, reputation, and stakeholder confidence when security incidents occur.

You can’t protect everything. As a leader, you need to know what information or systems are worth securing. This will help you develop a focused security strategy.

“Not all systems, assets, or data are equal. You need to be clear on your so-called crown jewels, the things that, if compromised, would put the business at serious risk. That might be customer data, it might be operational systems, it might be your intellectual property, your trading platform, or even your brand,” says Matt.

When, not if, something goes wrong, how well do your systems and teams respond?

“That isn't just about technical response times,” says Matt. “It's about your ability to communicate clearly, prioritize under pressure, and recover operations in a way that's measured, effective, and defensible.”

Build your team’s incident response skills.

“Resilience isn't the same as compliance,” explains Matt. “I've worked as a regulator, and I've seen organizations that tick every regulatory box, yet they still crumble under pressure. Why? Because the controls are there on paper, but no one knew how to use them when it mattered.”

Treat compliance as a starting point, not a destination. Resilient organizations:

• Embed cybersecurity in decision-making across the entire organization, not just tech teams

• Develop products with resiliency in mind

• Prioritize investments and vet suppliers based on cybersecurity principles

• Provide cybersecurity awareness training

• See security as as a critical part of business continuity planning

If you really want to prioritize cybersecurity resilience, make it a board-level KPI. Leaders should discuss resilience and recovery readiness metrics alongside other performance measures.

“Accountability has to be precise. ‘Cybersecurity is everyone's responsibility’ is true in spirit, but quite often, hollow in practice. The board must own risk acceptance. Executives must align resources and CISOs must provide visibility and coordinate response,” says Matt.

As technology, threats, and regulations change, your cybersecurity strategy should, too. Revisit your assumptions, stress test your plans, and learn from near misses, not just disasters.

“Resilience isn’t something a vendor can sell you. There's no product on the market called resilience. You can't buy it off the shelf, and you can't outsource it entirely,” says Matt.

“You build resilience through a combination of architecture, people, processes, and mindset. You invest in it, you rehearse for it, and you make space for it in how you plan, budget, and govern. This is one of the biggest mindset shifts I see in organizations moving from reactive to resilient.”

Keep your teams on top of the latest threats with cybersecurity awareness training.

In a resilient organization, people understand that security isn't a department—it's a mindset. And building a security culture is crucial to fostering this perspective. 

“Give employees the tools and the training, and most importantly, the psychological safety, to report concerns, admit mistakes, and ask questions,” says Matt.

“The uncomfortable truth is that the vast majority of incidents start with human action. It could be a misconfigured setting, or a click on a phishing email, or a weak password that's been reused one too many times. We can't eliminate those entirely, but we can create conditions where people are more likely to make good decisions.”

Get more tips on building a resilient cybersecurity culture—watch the on-demand webinar now.