Why cyber defense can’t be overlooked in 2025

The cyber defense posture of every organization is at risk – and 2025 is likely to test our abilities to the fullest around creating strength and resilience of our data and technology systems. An effective defense against criminals is a strong ‘offense,’ or a proactive and guided approach to business continuity planning. In this point of view, cyber resilience is a critical call-to-action for leaders, and I share pragmatic insights on how businesses can prepare to have a strong and resilient cyber defense posture. 

Digital connectivity creating new challenges for cyber resilience.

Today we are operating in an ever-more hyperconnected world, where data omnipotence is critical to enabling the digital experiences we have come to expect. The sheer volume of data and digital transactions continues to accelerate, with some $11 trillion in digital payments taking place in 2024, according to Nasdaq. On top of this, the ’attack surface’ of many organizations continues to grow, with an increasing dependence on integrating third-party products and systems and an endless amount of data sharing.

With the explosion of new artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, a cocktail of opportunity exists for today’s cybercriminals to prey on the vulnerable by leveraging technology for their advantage. The potential for painful business disruptions that can harm reputation and lead to financial losses is a very real byproduct – and is something boards are taking closer looks at to ensure they are not caught off-guard.

Simply put, business continuity is essential, and operational disruption is something no enterprise wants to experience. Cyber preparedness and resilience are the key to survive and thrive in today’s volatile cybersecurity landscape.

7 focus areas to achieve cyber resilience.

1. Be aware of threat scenarios – To achieve cyber resilience, it’s essential to gain a comprehensive and holistic view of the threat scenarios most relevant to your sector, as well as the maturity of your current security capabilities. This will allow you to rapidly understand the scale of cyber risk you face and what tangible actions will contribute the most to protecting your enterprise. A strategy may be completely different from one company to another one, but the more you know about your enemy and vulnerabilities, the better you can prepare.

2. Quantify cyber exposure with financial exposure to help with preparedness - By working with a highly skilled partner, financial models can be created that show the cost of various exposures and attacks. This will help you to make the business case needed for key investments and to elevate visibility to top management. Loss quantification models are a great tool to move beyond internal debates and discussions and turn risk into eye-opening financial risk numbers.

3. Detect incidents as soon as possible - Utilize a Security Operations Center (SOC) and AI to detect cyber incidents at the earliest possible stage. Early detection is crucial in mitigating the damage and responding effectively to threats. SOCs can provide continuous monitoring and analysis of security events, while AI can help identify patterns and anomalies that might indicate a cyber incident. This proactive approach helps ensure that threats are detected and addressed before they can cause significant harm – leading to greater cyber resilience.

4. The cloud is everywhere – Don’t take for granted the security protocols of your cloud provider. Not every provider has the depth of infrastructure like the leading hyper-scalers do. We recommend to deep dive into your set up to identify and mitigate misconfigurations, regularly monitor access logs for suspicious activity, and to address security gaps. Ongoing audits of your cloud configurations and policies are also a critical safety guard.

5. Strengthen your Operational Security (OT) – Too many poorly secured devices can be exploited to launch large-scale attacks, particularly with the sheer volume of connected devices (IoT) and the large usage of vulnerable equipment in manufacturing companies. Perform penetration testing on OT and IoT devices and networks to simulate potential attack scenarios. This helps in uncovering vulnerabilities that could be easily exploited, allowing your organization to strengthen security defenses and to fix identified weaknesses.

6. Be ready with a response plan - Consider a worst-case-scenario planning exercise to be ready with a speedy response – this can reduce the impact if the worst should happen. Also, have a partner on standby that can help with specialized expertise in identifying root causes, organizational communication and in interacting with authorities (should this be required). The opportunity here is being prepared for the unknown, and this is crucial to help ensure business continuity and cyber resilience.

7. Communication is critical - We recommend taking a strong look at your communications approach and how critical information is cascaded to staff, customers and suppliers in times of interruption.  Also consider creating a playbook so key leaders have a plan of how to tackle issues as they come. Finally, take an introspective look across your customer and partner ecosystems, as, for example a data breach will have far reaching communications consequences and response requirements.

Turn defense into a strength to create cyber resilience.

We see the seven areas outlined here as key opportunities to build capabilities to prevent interruptions and a potentially reputation-harming crisis. While today’s cyber criminals have become highly skilled, organizations can stay ahead. We see this as a tremendous opportunity to create resilience in 2025 and beyond. And this resilience can help ensure employees, customers and partners have the confidence and trust that you are as best prepared as possible.