Summary of the article
- Cybersecurity aims to prevent attacks using protection tools and standards (firewalls, MFA, SIEM, ISO 27001), while cyber resilience enables businesses to maintain operations and recover quickly when security is breached.
- The complementarity of cybersecurity and cyber resilience is becoming essential: modern attacks make prevention alone insufficient, and regulatory frameworks (NIS2, DORA) now require continuity, response, and recovery capabilities.
- Integrating resilience into the overall strategy requires a structured methodology: assessing current maturity, deploying BCP/DRP and immutable backups, testing regularly through crisis simulations, and then monitoring performance with indicators such as RTO and MTTR.
Faced with the proliferation of cyberattacks, companies can no longer rely solely on prevention: they must also be able to withstand attacks and recover quickly. This article clearly explains the difference between cybersecurity and cyber resilience, demonstrating why these two approaches are complementary, particularly in light of new regulatory requirements, and offering concrete suggestions for integrating them into a high-ROI strategy.
What is cybersecurity?
Definition: a set of measures designed to block attacks, protect data, and ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of systems. Key tools and standards:
- Firewalls, antivirus software, SIEM, multi-factor authentication (MFA)
- Standards and frameworks such as ISO 27001, NIS 2, GDPR (data protection requirements)
- Concrete example: phishing intercepted by an EDR or MFA solution.
What is cyber resilience?
Definition: an organization’s ability to continue operating and recover quickly after an attack or incident, even if cybersecurity has been compromised. Essential components:
- Business continuity via recovery plans (BCP/DRP), immutable backups, system redundancy
- Structured responses: crisis communication plans and exercises
Crisis communication plan
A cybersecurity incident within, for example, a small or medium-sized business is not just a technical problem: it is a crisis of confidence. Customers, partners, employees, the media, and even regulatory authorities may be affected. A crisis communication plan defines:
- Who communicates, both internally and externally (spokesperson, CIO, management, etc.);
- What messages are communicated, depending on the level of severity, the sensitivity of the data concerned, and legal obligations;
- When and through which channels (email, website, press, social media, etc.).
Anticipate crises and organize business continuity and recovery
Our Cyber Resilience solution enables you to anticipate crises and remain operational, even when your information system is down.
The goal is to avoid improvisation, increase clarity and responsiveness, and limit damage to reputation.
Anticipate crises and organize business continuity and recovery
Our Cyber Resilience solution allows you to anticipate crises and remain operational, even when your information system is down
Simulation exercises
At the same time, it is essential to test processes and teams through regular incident simulation exercises:
- These exercises validate the effectiveness of plans (PRA, communication, crisis decisions).
- They reveal weaknesses in the response chain: lack of coordination, inaccessible tools, poorly defined roles, delayed decisions.
- They create shared reflexes between business, IT, security, and management teams. These simulations can be:
- Technical, simulating a real attack on the IS;
- Organizational, in roundtable or role-playing mode between teams; • Or mixed, with full activation of incident response plans.
Key differences: cybersecurity vs. cyber resilience
| Criterion | Cybersecurity | Cyber Resilience |
| Objective | Prevent attacks | Recover and maintain operations during/after an attack |
| Timeframe | Before the incident | During and after the incident |
| Measures | Firewalls, SIEM, MFA, ISO 27001 standard | BCP/DRP, backups, exercises |
| Performance metric | Number of attacks prevented | Recovery time, availability |
Why are these approaches complementary?
Today, it is no longer a question of choosing between cybersecurity and cyber resilience, but of making them work together intelligently. A purely defensive strategy quickly becomes obsolete in the face of persistent, sophisticated, and sometimes unavoidable attacks.
Similarly, resilience without upstream security amounts to organizing good crisis management… but without seeking to avoid it.
By combining the two, an organization can anticipate, limit the impact, and speed up the return to normal in the event of an incident. It is this complementarity that is sought today in standards and reference frameworks, such as NIST or European requirements (NIS 2, DORA). It allows security, performance, and business continuity to be aligned, while reassuring customers, partners, and authorities.
Integrating cyber resilience into an overall strategy
1. Assess your current posture
Before integrating resilience, you need to know your starting point. This requires an honest assessment of the company’s cybersecurity maturity: auditing vulnerabilities, analyzing existing systems (security tools, internal policies, team training), and mapping critical assets.
It is also essential to analyze past incident scenarios: what were the operational consequences? Who managed the crisis? How long did the interruption last? These elements make it possible to prioritize resilience actions where the business impact would be greatest.
=> Audit and mapping of cybersecurity risks (vulnerabilities, coverage, compliance).
=> Post-incident review: who does what, how, and by when?
2. Implement resilience plans
Once areas of vulnerability have been identified, a clear and tested strategy must be developed. This includes implementing or updating business continuity plans (BCPs) and disaster recovery plans (DRPs), which define how to maintain or restore critical functions after a cyberattack.
Backups must be regular, offline, or immutable to prevent ransomware from encrypting them. The strategy must also include simulated crisis exercises to test coordination between IT, business, and senior management teams. Good resilience is not just about having a ready infrastructure; it’s also about having an organization that knows how to respond quickly and effectively.
=> Deploy or strengthen BCPs/DRPs, immutable backups, and automation of failovers.
=> Organize regular simulations and role-playing exercises in crisis situations.
=> Involve stakeholders, train teams, and strengthen the security culture.
3. Manage using simple and clear indicators
Cyber resilience cannot improve without continuous performance measurement. Two key indicators are used to monitor an organization’s resilience:
=> MTTR (Mean Time To Recovery) refers to the average time required to restore a service after an incident. The shorter it is, the more effective the resilience. It is calculated by dividing the total recovery time by the number of incidents.
=> RTO (Recovery Time Objective) is the maximum acceptable time before a service interruption has critical consequences. It is a target to be achieved, often defined in advance for each activity.
=> RTO vs. MTTR: think of it as target (RTO) vs. actual performance (MTTR).
To ensure robust business continuity in the face of cyber threats, it is not a question of choosing between prevention and response but rather combining the two. By integrating them into a coherent strategy, supported by simulations, concrete indicators, and a shared culture, decision-makers ensure not only immediate security but also the long-term sustainability and profitability of the business.
