Navigating the Digital Storm: Why Shared Experiences are Your Compass to Cyber Resilience

In today's hyper-connected world, where businesses and governments are increasingly reliant on digital technologies, cyber resilience is no longer a luxury – it's a fundamental requirement. We exist in a landscape of heightened cyber risks, facing more sophisticated, well-resourced and innovative threat actors. This reality means that no system is entirely secure, and 100% cybersecurity cannot be achieved.

Traditional cybersecurity, focused primarily on preventing incidents through technical controls, has evolved. The modern focus, encapsulated by "cyber resilience," is broader. It's about an organization's ability to minimize the impact of significant cyber incidents on its primary business goals and objectives. The aim is to safeguard critical services, protect stakeholder confidence, and preserve strategic value, even when an attack occurs. This involves measures both pre- and post-incident to limit various potential impacts – short-term or long-term, operational or strategic, financial, legal, or reputational.

The Complex Journey: No Universal Blueprint

Achieving cyber resilience is a complex, dynamic, and ongoing process. There is no one-size-fits-all solution, and no universal blueprint for success. The specific actions an organization takes must tailor and scope its approach based on its specific context, strategy, and external factors.

Many characteristics influence an organization's unique cyber resilience journey:

• Its size and the scope of its operations
• The degree of digitalization and the centrality of its technological systems (IT, OT, IoT)
• Whether it's part of critical national infrastructure or subject to regulations
• Its supply chain dependencies
• The diversity of cybersecurity capacities within its units
• The availability of skilled cybersecurity professionals
• Sector- and industry-specific challenges

Given this complexity and the ever-evolving threat landscape, how can organizations effectively build and refine their resilience?

The Power of Collective Knowledge: Sharing "What Works"

While every organization's context is unique, they don't have to navigate this journey alone. A key insight highlighted in the sources is that sharing learnings about "what works" is key to building collective knowledge in the field. The collective experiences and insights of peers can illuminate paths to success. By drawing on the experiences of others, organizations can identify effective strategies and shape their own resilience roadmaps.

This is where collaborative sharing becomes essential. Exchanging insights and lessons learned with peers can significantly help organizations to leverage effective practices and strategies. It provides vital inspiration and direction.

The Cyber Resilience Compass: A Vehicle for Exchange

Recognizing the critical role of collaboration, knowledge-sharing and adaptive learning, the World Economic Forum, in collaboration with the University of Oxford, undertook an initiative culminating in "The Cyber Resilience Compass". This initiative gathered insights on leading practices through extensive consultations and workshops with cyber leaders across geographies and industries.

The Cyber Resilience Compass is designed to be a vehicle for organizations to exchange experiences and identify front-line practices. It's not a static tool, but a dynamic resource facilitating the collection and sharing of "what works in practice".

The front-line practices and issues gathered from these discussions are systemized into seven interrelated categories to help organizations define their cyber resilience journey:

• Leadership: Setting goals, decision-making, and providing direction.
• Governance, risk and compliance: Managing risk and meeting compliance requirements.
• People and culture: Building and retaining talent, employee awareness, and psychological safety.
• Business processes: Prioritizing, designing, implementing, and adapting functions for resilience.
• Technical systems: Designing, deploying, and maintaining IT, OT, cloud, and cybersecurity tools.
• Crisis management: Responding to and recovering from incidents.
• Ecosystem engagement: Interacting with the wider ecosystem, including supply chains, customers, competitors, and regulators.

While each category is vital, the very nature of cyber resilience today emphasizes the interconnectedness, both within the organization and with external entities.

Beyond the Organization: The Importance of Ecosystem Engagement

Individual organizational resilience can depend heavily on the resilience of the broader ecosystem, which requires collaborative action. This crucial element is captured in the "Ecosystem engagement" category. It involves understanding and managing dependencies with external parties, consistently assessing risk bidirectionally, responding in partnership with external actors, and sharing information in external forums.

Information-sharing networks, such as Information Sharing and Analysis Centres (ISACs) and Computer Emergency Response Teams (CERTs), play a critical role here. Engaging actively in these networks helps organizations identify threats faster, proactively mitigate vulnerabilities, share resources, and manage systemic risk. The sources provide examples of the power of this collective defense, such as the Business Resilience Council (BRC) coordinating response to a global IT outage or the BGD e-GOV CIRT combating phishing attacks through intelligence sharing. These cases demonstrate how pre-established relationships and coordinated responses can mitigate widespread cyber disruptions.

Learning and Adapting Together

Ultimately, navigating the complex cyber landscape and building a robust resilience posture is an adaptive learning process. By leveraging shared experiences, organizations can move beyond treating cyber risk solely as "the CISO's problem" and embed responsibility across the business. They can gain insights into effective strategies like Mærsk's shift to a quantified, risk-based approach or Henkel's rethinking of IT resilience for ransomware recovery.

The Cyber Resilience Compass initiative, rooted in the practical experiences of over 100 experts from diverse organizations, seeks to provide these valuable insights. By using it to share and learn from front-line practices, organizations can transition to a more consistent, measurable and future-ready approach to cyber resilience, better preparing themselves for the ever-changing challenges ahead. It is through collaborative action and leveraging the collective knowledge of the ecosystem that we can truly strengthen cyber resilience.