Cyber Resilience
Cyber Resilience That Holds Up on Your Worst Day
Prevention will eventually fail somewhere. Resilience decides whether that is a bad afternoon or a business crisis. We help leadership know what must keep running, how fast it has to come back, and whether the organization can actually do it.
Why Resilience Is a Leadership Issue
Recovery is where the damage happens
The cost of an incident is driven as much by how long critical operations stay down, and how well leadership decides under pressure, as by the initial compromise.
Untested plans fail on contact
Unclear decision rights, backups nobody has tried to restore, and dependencies nobody mapped are what break first. You find them in an exercise or in a real incident.
Everyone is asking for proof
Boards, insurers, customers, and regulators expect evidence of tested response and recovery: SEC incident disclosure, HIPAA contingency planning, NIST CSF 2.0 Respond and Recover, and EU rules like NIS2 and DORA.
Fixed scope, defined deliverables
Four Ways to Build Resilience
Start where you are. Each package stands on its own, and together they take you from “we don’t know” to “we’ve proven it.”
Start here · about 4 weeks
Resilience Assessment
Know what would break, and how long it would take to recover.
Best for: organizations that haven’t mapped what the business depends on, or can’t say how long recovery would really take.
- →Business impact analysis: critical services with recovery time and recovery point targets
- →Dependency mapping across systems, vendors, and people
- →Review of incident response, business continuity, and disaster recovery plans
- →Backup and recovery capability check, including whether restores have been tested
- →Gap analysis against NIST CSF 2.0 Respond and Recover
- →Executive briefing and a prioritized resilience roadmap
Prepare · about 6 weeks
Incident Response Planning & Exercises
Decide who does what before your worst day, not during it.
Best for: organizations without a plan their team can run under pressure, or with a plan that has never been exercised.
- →Incident response plan development or overhaul
- →Roles, decision rights, and escalation paths
- →Ransomware, business email compromise, and data breach playbooks
- →Executive and technical tabletop exercises with after-action reports
- →Crisis communications and regulatory notification mapping
Prove · about 6 to 8 weeks
Ransomware & Recovery Readiness
Know you can restore, instead of assuming it.
Best for: organizations that depend on backups and recovery they have never put under realistic pressure.
- →Recovery sequencing: what comes back first, and who decides
- →Backup and immutability review against ransomware attack paths
- →Recovery runbooks and rebuild planning for critical services
- →Restore-testing plan with clear success criteria
- →Technical exercise with your IT and security teams
- →Decision framework for ransom-demand scenarios, including legal, insurer, and law-enforcement engagement
Sustain · 12-month program
Annual Resilience Program
Keep resilience current as the business changes.
Best for: organizations that want recovery readiness to stay tested instead of aging on a shelf.
- →Quarterly exercise cadence, alternating executive and technical scenarios
- →Plan updates after changes to systems, vendors, and leadership
- →Resilience metrics for leadership: readiness, exercise findings closed, response times
- →Post-incident reviews and improvement tracking
- →Senior guidance during a real incident
Included in Fractional CISO Embedded and Interim engagements.
Part of a Larger Program
Resilience works best when it is owned by someone accountable and covers the risks you actually have.
Fractional CISO
One accountable leader owns resilience year-round: exercised, measured, and reported to leadership. See the levels →
AI Governance
AI adds new failure modes: vendor outages, misbehaving models, data exposure. Include them in your scenarios and recovery plans. Explore AI governance →
Targeted Engagements
Risk assessments, compliance readiness, and due diligence that feed directly into your resilience priorities. See engagements →
Start With a Free Self-Assessment
Rate your cybersecurity maturity across the six NIST CSF 2.0 functions, including Respond and Recover, and get an AI-generated 90-day roadmap. No account required.
Launch the NIST CSF 2.0 Assessment →Who Leads the Work
Michael W. Gross has spent more than 14 years in cyber resilience, at PNC Bank and Cleveland Clinic. At Cleveland Clinic his incident response leadership cut the organization’s mean time to respond (MTTR) by 40%.
About Michael →Cyber Resilience FAQ
What is cyber resilience?+
Cyber resilience is an organization’s ability to keep operating through a cyber incident and recover quickly afterward. Cybersecurity focuses on preventing and detecting attacks; resilience assumes some will succeed and asks whether the business can withstand the impact, restore critical services, and make sound decisions under pressure.
What is the difference between incident response, business continuity, and disaster recovery?+
Incident response is how you detect, contain, and investigate a security incident. Disaster recovery is how you restore systems and data. Business continuity is how the business keeps serving customers while systems are down. Cyber resilience ties the three together so they work from the same priorities and have been tested together.
How often should we run a tabletop exercise?+
At least once a year is the common baseline, and again after major changes to systems, vendors, or leadership. Organizations with higher risk or regulatory exposure often exercise more often and vary the audience, alternating executive scenarios with technical ones.
Where should we start?+
If you are unsure how well you could recover, start with the Resilience Assessment, which identifies what matters most, how fast it must return, and where the gaps are. If you already know you need a tested incident response plan, start with Incident Response Planning & Exercises.