Jon TamplinCyber Resilience 101

In today's threat landscape, cyberattacks are no longer a question of if, but when. That's why resilience, not just prevention, is critical. Based on insights from our own experience helping organisations strengthen their defences, as well as industry best practices, here are five essential steps to improve your cyber resilience posture.

1. Ensure Complete Device Visibility

You can't protect what you can't see. A foundational requirement for resilience is maintaining an up-to-date, accurate inventory of all devices accessing your environment—including unmanaged or "stealth" devices that often go undetected. These can introduce significant risk if they're connecting to corporate resources without proper security controls in place.

Our research shows that organisations typically discover an average of 30% more devices accessing corporate systems than previously known. This highlights a critical blind spot that traditional asset management approaches often miss.

Organisations need real-time asset discovery and monitoring to ensure full coverage, especially as hybrid work models and BYOD policies expand the attack surface. A single source of truth across your entire digital ecosystem is essential for effective cyber resilience.

2. Continuously Validate Security Controls

Most security strategies operate on the assumption that controls are in place and working. But the reality is more dynamic. Controls drift, fail, or are misconfigured—sometimes silently. Continuous validation means going beyond periodic scans to implement real-time monitoring that validates not just deployment, but actual functionality of security controls across your entire estate. This means actively checking that controls are enforced and effective across all endpoints. Automated alerts should notify your team the moment a gap appears, enabling faster remediation and reducing your exposure window.

3. Strengthen Credential Policies and Authentication Methods

User credentials remain one of the most targeted attack vectors. To harden this layer:

Enforce strong, regularly updated password policies

Mandate the use of Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) across all applications

Implement Single Sign-On (SSO) to centralise access control and simplify user management

These are basic steps, but many breaches still succeed due to weak or reused credentials. Getting this right is table stakes for cyber resilience.

4. Develop and Integrate Comprehensive Response Plans

A robust security posture relies on the seamless integration of three critical disciplines: Disaster Recovery (DR), Business Continuity Planning (BCP), and Incident Response (IR). Each serves a distinct but interconnected purpose:

Disaster Recovery: Focuses on restoring IT systems and data after a disruptive event.

Business Continuity Planning: Ensures critical business operations continue during and after an incident.

Incident Response: Provides structured, tested playbooks for responding to specific cyber incidents, such as ransomware, insider threats, or supply chain compromise.

Every plan should be well-documented, regularly tested, and have clearly define roles, escalation paths, and communication protocols. Critically, these plans must extend beyond IT to include legal, compliance, communications, and executive leadership, ensuring a coordinated response across all business functions.

5. Conduct Regular Incident Response Exercises

Even the best plans fall short without practice. Regular tabletop exercises involving both technical teams and senior stakeholders are vital. These drills reveal gaps, clarify expectations, and ensure alignment across the organisation.

The goal is to create muscle memory, so that when a real incident hits, your team acts swiftly and decisively.

Final Thoughts

Cyber resilience is not achieved overnight. It's an ongoing process of identifying weaknesses, strengthening controls, and ensuring your people, processes, and technologies are ready to respond.

The five steps outlined above are a strong foundation, but they require discipline, coordination, and the right tooling to be effective.

At ThreatAware, we help security teams transform these principles into action through our agentless platform that delivers complete visibility, continuous validation, and automated remediation, enabling you to achieve cyber resilience with minimal effort. Our patent-pending timeline matching technology provides the accuracy and single source of truth that modern security operations demand.

If you're looking to operationalise these steps or benchmark your current resilience posture, we'd be happy to talk.