Cyberattacks increased 44 percent globally in 2024, according to Check Point’s State of Global Cyber Security 2025 report. An IBM study found that 83 percent of organizations reported at least one insider attack in 2024. In a 2024 Cloud Security Alliance survey, 95 percent of organizations said they suffered cloud-related breaches, with 92 percent of those reporting sensitive data exposure.
A cyberattack is virtually inevitable. How an organization responds to an attack will determine whether it weathers the storm or suffers potentially devastating losses. The key cyber resilience — an organization’s ability to anticipate, mitigate, recover from and adapt to cyberattacks and other disruptions.
Cyber resilience goes beyond traditional cybersecurity, which focuses on prevention. A cyber resilience strategy builds in mechanisms to minimize damage, maintain operations and learn from the event. It combines elements of cybersecurity and business continuity in a risk-based approach that encompasses the entire enterprise.
The Law of Diminishing Returns?
It’s not just that the volume of cyberattacks has increased. Attacks are increasingly sophisticated, and organizations are struggling to combat them using traditional security tools. Threat actors are using advanced techniques to find and exploit vulnerabilities that organizations don’t even realize they have. They’re also using AI to generate social engineering attacks that are almost impossible for humans to detect.
Many organizations are spending more on cybersecurity to improve their ability to prevent these threats. However, the rate of increase is slowing, dropping from 8 percent in 2024 to 4 percent in 2025, according to IANS Research and Artico Search. For the first time in five years, the percentage of overall IT budgets dedicated to cybersecurity declined, falling from 11.9 percent in 2024 to 10.9 percent in 2025.
Economic headwinds and geopolitical concerns are impacting budgets, but organizations are also shifting their focus to strategic investments and optimizing existing security systems. They are looking to balance threat prevention with rapid detection and response, which can be more cost-effective and have a greater short-term impact on their security posture.
What Are the Elements of a Cyber Resilience Strategy?
A cyber resilience strategy still emphasizes prevention. Organizations need the ability to proactively identify threats and vulnerabilities and design systems to resist attacks and protect data. However, cyber resilience prioritizes detection, using advanced tools and techniques to spot anomalies and alert security personnel of a potential attack. The faster a breach is detected and mitigated, the lower the cost.
Organizations should also have a defined incident response plan with clear roles, communication channels and decision-making processes. The plan helps guide actions during a crisis for faster recovery. Finally, organizations should learn from each cyber event and use those lessons to improve internal competencies and the overall resilience strategy.
Cyber resilience limits the impact of successful attacks and ensures that critical services and data remain available. It also helps organizations maintain trust by demonstrating their ability to protect their operations and their customers’ data. By fostering a culture of continuous improvement, cyber resilience enables organizations to adapt to the ever-evolving threat landscape.
What Security Tools Are Needed?
The four key elements of a cyber resilience strategy help guide the selection of security tools. For prevention, organizations need firewalls, antimalware software, vulnerability scanners and multifactor authentication. Intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDS/IPS) and endpoint detection and response (EDR) help identify threats quickly, while security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) automates security workflows.
Data backup, encryption and immutable storage are critical to prevent the loss or exposure of sensitive information. Monitoring and management tools provide the visibility needed to maintain a strong security posture. A robust cyber resilience “stack” also includes processes such as employee awareness training, incident response drills and vendor risk management.
The Cerium team is here to help you develop a cyber resilience strategy and implement that strategy using best-of-breed tools from industry-leading vendors. Let us help you build the mechanisms to reduce the risk of attack, minimize damage, maintain operations and emerge stronger by learning from the event.
