Business-disrupting cyber attacks are hitting organisations at a pace never seen before.
Geopolitical conflicts are having repercussions across the globe, while severe weather, which will be exacerbated by a particularly large El Niño effect this year, threatens to disrupt the continuity of organisations and their employees’ ability to travel to work.
This is happening as conflicts move into the digital world, with nation-states targeting, or threatening to target, critical infrastructure to disrupt and harm countries and societies.
We are also seeing conflict extend into areas once thought to be outside conventional warfare.
Cyberattacks, drones, interference with satellite signals, threats to undersea cables and the use of proxies to carry out physical attacks are all part of today’s threat landscape.
Together, these factors create a highly volatile environment for businesses today. But it has also reinforced the importance of resilience.
The majority of businesses may not be the intended or primary target for nation-state attacks. However, every business depends on digital, complex global supply chains. They can often get caught in the crossfire, interrupting their operations while inflicting significant financial damage.
This has placed societal and operational resilience high on the agenda for CEOs across the globe.
However, to improve resilience, organisations also need to consider whether their strategies remain fit for purpose, given the scale and range of threats they face today.
This requires adopting and taking an all-hazards approach to resilience, rather than looking at different threats in isolation.
The root cause of incidents
One of the biggest challenges organisations face when a major incident happens is that they often don’t immediately know what they are dealing with.
If IT systems suddenly stop working, it could be a cyber attack, a software failure or a wider infrastructure problem.
Regardless of the cause, organisations still need to find a way to respond and recover as quickly as possible.
This is one of the key reasons why our approach to resilience needs to change.
It’s tempting to prepare detailed plans for every possible scenario, but you can’t predict exactly what the next major incident will look like.
Instead, organisations need to identify their “crown jewels” and what is essential for them to keep going when something unexpected happens.
Which functions absolutely have to continue? Who needs to make decisions? How do they communicate if their usual systems are unavailable? What happens if staff cannot get into work, the internet goes down or power is lost?
These are questions that apply to every potential business-disrupting event.
A problem in one area can quickly have consequences elsewhere, making it increasingly difficult to treat cyber security, physical security, infrastructure and business continuity as separate issues.
Whether an outage is caused by a hostile state, a cyber criminal, an arson attack, ageing infrastructure or simply bad luck, organisations still have to answer the same questions. What needs to keep running? What can we do without? How do we communicate? And, most importantly, how quickly can we recover?
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Lord Toby Harris, Chairman of the National Preparedness Committee, is speaking at DTX + UCX London 2026.
During his Main Stage keynote, titled Preparing for a TUNA world – resilience and recovery, he will look at how organisations can prepare for a much wider range of disruption and why resilience needs to be about more than having a plan on paper. It is about understanding what really matters to your organisation and being ready to adapt to the unexpected.
Join Toby on the Main Stage on Thursday 15th October at 10:15 – 11:00AM
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