Cyber Resilience FAQs

Frequently Asked Questions: Cyber Resilience

1. What is cyber resilience? 

Cyber resilience isn’t just about preventing cyber attacks. It’s also about your organisation’s ability to respond effectively to a cyber incident, recover quickly, and continue operating confidently after an attack.

 2. Why has cyber resilience become so important?

Almost 50% of UK businesses experienced a cyber attack in the past year, and this is just counting the incidents that were reported. 46% of small businesses were affected, showing this is not just a large enterprise problem. As attacks become faster and more convincing with the help of AI, cyber incidents aren’t a case of if, but when. Preparation has never been more critical with the ability to minimise downtime, financial loss, and reputational damage, and prevent non-compliance. This means business resilience is now a non-negotiable – and it’s become an expectation from clients, cyber insurance companies, and auditors and regulators.

3. What is the difference between cyber security and cyber resilience?

Cyber security protects your people, systems, and data against cyber attacks. It brings together proactive measures, including continuous monitoring and user education, to minimise the risk of a cyber incident.

Cyber resilience treats cyber incidents as inevitable, and focuses on your business’ ability to prepare for, withstand, and recover from an attack. Done well, it enables your business to keep running even when an incident occurs. Like cyber security, it’s not set and forget – it involves iterative improvement, so businesses learn from cyber attacks, fortify their approach, and adapt to evolving threats. 

4. What does good cyber resilience look like?

 In practice a good cyber resilience strategy brings together governance, people, consistency, and ongoing improvement. Principles include the following:

• Business leaders who have visibility and treat cyber resilience as a business responsibility (not an IT issue).
• A clear understanding of risks, their potential business impact, and critical assets, systems, and information.
• Strong governance with clear policies and procedures that outline responsibilities to manage cyber risk and incidents.
• Proactive, preventative measures in place that safeguard people, systems, and data. This includes ongoing security awareness training for your team and a strong cyber security culture within your business.
• The ability to detect threats in real-time, and rapidly respond to contain them to minimise damage.
• Tested recovery plans and processes, and reliable data backups that support business continuity.
• Reviews following incidents, so tools and processes can be updated where required, gaps can be closed, and strong cyber resilience is supported.

5. Why is the UK government increasing its focus on cyber resilience?

Today’s cyber threats are more frequent, sophisticated, and successful. As these threats evolve, the impact is felt by local businesses, our communities, and the economy. This reality has prompted the UK government to focus on reforms that will build cyber resilience and support economic stability – including the introduction of the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill, which will update the Network and Information Systems (NIS) Regulations 2018.

While this bill hasn’t passed yet, it expands the scope of organisations that fall under NIS regulations (including data centres, some managed service providers, large load controllers, and designated critical suppliers) and aims to raise UK cyber resilience and help businesses keep pace with changing threats.

6. How can Virtuoso support UK organisations to build cyber resilience?

Our experts support your business to create a strategy, support governance, and implement a cyber resilience framework. This enables your people, systems, and data to stay secure in the face of existing and emerging threats. As a result, you gain peace of mind that your business has the ability to respond, recover, and keep running when a cyber attack occurs.

The businesses that succeed aren’t the ones that avoid attacks altogether – they’re the ones that are prepared to respond and recover quickly, and improve. If you want to be confident in your cyber resilience, please get in touch with our team today.

About the author

Markus McIver

Markus has spent over two decades helping businesses get more from their technology. As Managing Director at Virtuoso, he leads a team obsessed with making IT a driver of growth rather than a source of friction, covering everything from cyber resilience and Microsoft cloud to co-managed IT partnerships.

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