Time to read: 3 minutes, 9 seconds | Published: September 5, 2025
Cyber resilience What is cyber resilience?
Cyber resilience is an organization’s capacity for adaptability to cyber threats, without interrupting business integrity, purpose, and continuity. It represents an enterprise’s level of preparedness to anticipate, detect, prevent, react, remediate, and recover from cyberattacks.
Why does cyber resilience matter?
Cyber resilience is essential to the protection of enterprise organizations’ IT systems, critical infrastructure, data, and applications. It matters because it helps organizations recognize that hackers have the upper hand—this approach forces organizations to reconcile with “unknown unknowns” and be even more innovative, comprehensive, and urgent in their approach.
Cyber resilience acknowledges that there is no guarantee of detecting and preventing every attack. A combination of both preventative measures and remediation and recovery measures are necessary to create true cyber resilience. With proper cyber resilience, entities are able to continuously deliver their intended outcomes despite any adverse cyber events.
How can my organization be more cyber resilient?
Enterprises must examine their organizations and identify vulnerabilities, risks, and business impacts. Performing penetration testing, risk assessments, and business impact analysis can help prioritize the most critical and vulnerable elements in an organization. Having identified the key areas of need, organizations can implement changes including staff training, zero-trust security, cyber recovery planning, and any software or hardware resilience updates that support a more cyber resilient IT infrastructure. Finally, the measures put into place must be continually tested and re-evaluated to consider new and evolving threats, risks, and vulnerabilities.
Cyber resilience against zero-day attacks
A zero-day attack is when hackers successfully exploit a vulnerability within a system, before software developers or managers have the chance to solve for the attack and implement any type of defense. This occurs through targeted attacks on vulnerabilities that software developers do not yet know exist.
A zero-day attack is when hackers successfully exploit a vulnerability within a system, before software developers or managers have the chance to solve for the attack and implement any type of defense. This occurs through targeted attacks on vulnerabilities that software developers do not yet know exist.
Enterprises can follow a four-step plan to improve resilience when dealing with zero-day attacks:
1. Anticipate and detect
In addition to preparing for known cyberattacks and vulnerabilities organizations must complete holistic risk assessments to evaluate risk levels in order to deal with both known and unknown threats. Organizations must accept that cyber threats can successfully penetrate systems despite the best attempts at prevention. Detecting potential cyber threats must go beyond looking for known threats and be able to detect anomalous and suspicious activity that could indicate an attack.
2. Isolate and withstand
To maintain your business-critical applications during a zero-day attack, your enterprise must have the correct security architecture in place. Having recovery data isolated by air-gapping and immutability prevents attackers from compromising recovery. An isolated recovery infrastructure can allow initial recovery where attackers cannot reach to begin remediation. By having a continuity plan based on zero-trust architecture in moments of disaster, your organization can implement its incident response plan during a cyberattack.
3. Remediate and recover
With the main focus on business continuity, cyber resilience also includes elements of disaster recovery strategy that focus specifically on recovery from attacks. Cyber recovery goes beyond traditional disaster recovery because it must remediate vulnerabilities and compromised systems to prevent attackers from continuing to exploit the same systems. Having a cyber recovery plan in place plays a role in cyber resilience as it allows for recuperation from successful attacks launched against your organization.
4. Test and adapt
The ability of organizations to learn from attacks is essential to sustainable cyber resilience. Learning from ongoing testing of cyber security and cyber recovery as well as learning from actual attacks promotes agility and continuous improvement within your organization’s infrastructure.
HPE and cyber resilience
With constantly evolving cyber threats infiltrating every enterprise, there are significant challenges for security and IT teams. Our HPE Security, Risk, and Compliance Services experts will help you understand and address gaps in security, risk, and compliance programs across your organization and remotely monitor, detect, and help resolve issues while identifying ways for continuous improvement against evolving threats.
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Implement zero trust security across your infrastructure with HPE Security-First, AI-Powered Networking, and HPE Data Protection Products including the HPE Cyber Resilience Vault. Leverage our unique combination of platform, products, process, and people to expand your capacity for innovation and take advantage of new technologies quickly, without waiting until your organization has the necessary skills.