Understanding Digital Resilience: Foresight and Navigation through Cyber Heavy Weather

In 2025, a single cyber attack shut down a carmaker’s plants in five countries, cost the UK economy an estimated £1.9 billion, and prompted the British government to issue an unprecedented loan guarantee to limit the growing damage to suppliers and customers.

Digital storms have wide-ranging sources and impacts. Geopolitical conflicts pursued through digital disruptions of critical services, AI finding software vulnerabilities enabling attacks faster than human teams can patch, technological errors of a single major digital service provider, and supply chains that snap under pressure can all combine into a polycrisis causing chaos across the globe. Organizations that effectively respond to such crises understand the drivers of digital risk, analyze potential threatening situations, and prepare before these storms arrive.

Understanding Digital Resilience gives leaders a framework for that preparation, built on four steps: 1) insight into the drivers shaping your risk; 2) preparation through scenario evaluation, exercises, and testing; 3) execution of response and recovery practices when the storm makes landfall; and 4) evolution of those practices to further minimize the impact of the next storm. The authors build upon proven planning methodologies from military wargames to corporate scenario analysis to horizon scanning. Analyzing real world cyber attacks as well as scenarios portraying plausible future polycrisis possibilities, the book illustrates how organizations can build digital resilience capacity.

You cannot stop the storms. You can decide, well in advance, how to prepare, survive, and thrive.