For years, cybersecurity strategies have centred around keeping threats out. But in 2025, that is no longer viable as the only line of defence. Perimeters have dissolved, attack surfaces increased, and even the best perimeter security has proved fallible.
The direction of travel is clear: from protection to preparedness. In a world where breaches are a matter of when, not if, resilience has become the new north star.
In 2026, success won’t be defined by whether you can prevent every attack; but by how quickly you can detect, respond, and recover without grinding the business to a halt.
This past year, the scale and sophistication of cyber threats grew; but so did the understanding that prevention alone isn’t enough.
AI-powered attacks became mainstream. From convincing deepfake voice scams to phishing-as-a-service kits sold on the dark web, attackers now use the same generative tools businesses are adopting. According to the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), generative AI is already being used to lower the technical barrier for cybercrime, making attacks faster to launch and harder to detect.
At the same time, businesses faced a surge in third-party and supply chain risks. In a world of interconnected platforms and APIs, a vulnerability in a software library or a misconfigured SaaS app can compromise dozens of companies in one move. In 2025, several UK organisations were caught out by breaches that didn’t originate from their own systems; but from suppliers, partners, and third-party tools.
As a result, more businesses began changing their cyber priorities - from preventing every incident to limiting damage, recovering quickly, and maintaining operational continuity. In other words: breach resilience.
Looking ahead, cyber resilience won’t just be best practice. It will be required.
In the UK, regulators and insurers are tightening their expectations. The Bank of England, PRA, and FCA have made operational resilience a regulated requirement for financial firms, with a deadline of March 2025 to define and test impact tolerances. Similar pressures are emerging in sectors like energy, healthcare, and telecoms, where critical infrastructure regulations now expect clear evidence of disaster recovery and incident response capabilities.
Cyber insurers are following suit. Coverage is becoming conditional on having tested, documented recovery plans, immutable backups, and segmented access policies. If you can’t demonstrate how you’ll bounce back from a breach, you may struggle to get insured; or face dramatically higher premiums.
At the same time, we’re seeing increased demand for real-time cyber observability - dashboards, playbooks, and visibility mapped to frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK. Boards and regulators no longer want post-mortems. They want live data. They want to know what’s happening now.
And beyond compliance, trust is becoming a market differentiator. Customers and partners - even in B2B - want assurance that their data is protected, their services will stay online, and any incident will be handled transparently and professionally.
Cyber resilience depends on decisions made across the IT estate. Not just within the cybersecurity team.
Modern workplace environments have pushed the attack surface far beyond the office firewall. Personal devices, home routers, unsecured SaaS logins, and shadow IT all contribute to a sprawling digital edge that’s hard to monitor and harder to control. Strong identity management, conditional access, and zero trust policies are now fundamental to enabling secure work from anywhere.
Cloud architectures also play a central role. In multi-cloud and hybrid environments, responsibility is shared, but not always clearly understood. Small oversights in configuration, access, or logging can create major blind spots. In fact, cloud misconfiguration routinely tops leaderboards as one of the leading causes of data breaches globally, with small and mid-sized businesses particularly vulnerable due to lack of internal expertise.
Meanwhile, AI adds complexity in both directions. On one hand, it enables threat detection, behavioural analysis, and automated response. On the other, it introduces new attack vectors: model poisoning, prompt injection, and data leakage through poorly governed tools. Without the right controls, the very tools designed to increase productivity can expose sensitive data in unexpected ways.
Even network design plays a part. As secure access service edge (SASE) and zero trust network access (ZTNA) models become the norm, security is increasingly built into the flow of traffic; not just wrapped around endpoints.
When breaches do happen - and they will - the difference between disruption and disaster comes down to readiness.
These aren’t just IT questions anymore. They’re operational ones, board-level ones, and - increasingly - regulatory ones.
In a 2024 report by Hiscox, 67% of businesses said they’d experienced a cyberattack in the past 12 months. But only 34% of business leaders feel their organisation is adequately prepared to handle cyber attacks. That gap represents not just risk, but exposure - to regulators, to insurers, and to public trust.
In 2026, the best-prepared organisations won’t be those with the most firewalls, but those who’ve accepted that perfection isn’t possible, and planned accordingly.
They’ll have:
In short, they’ll treat cybersecurity not as a set of reactive controls, but as a resilience strategy embedded across people, platforms, and infrastructure.
Let’s talk about building cyber resilience, not just cyber defence
Whether you’re reviewing your response plans, strengthening supply chain oversight, or exploring ways to improve visibility and recovery; our team can help.
Talk to us about how to build a security strategy that’s ready for whatever happens next.
