From awareness training to the balance sheet: A leader's guide to building true cyber resilience

For years, the focus of Cybersecurity Awareness Month has been on education – a necessary, but unfortunately incomplete, part of the solution. Despite countless training sessions and phishing simulations, the financial consequences of cyber incidents continue to climb. According to IBM, the average cost of a data breach for a South African organisation now stands at a staggering R41.1 million.

This number confirms a difficult truth: awareness is not the same as resilience. Knowing that fast food is unhealthy does not, on its own, create a healthy lifestyle. Similarly, knowing about cyber threats does not, on its own, protect an organisation’s balance sheet.

The conversation in the boardroom must evolve from asking "Are our employees aware?" to "Is our business resilient?". Resilience is not a passive state of knowledge; it is an active, measurable capability to anticipate, withstand, and recover from cyberattacks, ensuring the organisation continues to function and protect its value.

Building the ‘human firewall’ higher

The idea of a ‘human firewall’ often frames employees as the weakest link in the security chain. A more productive approach is to view them as a critical, front-line layer of a broader defence strategy. This requires more than just awareness; it demands clear, simple processes.

When an employee spots a potential threat, is the process for reporting it immediate and unambiguous? Do they know exactly who to contact without having to consult a manual? Empowering employees means equipping them not just with knowledge, but with straightforward, drilled procedures that make the right action the easiest action. This transforms them from a potential liability into a distributed threat detection network.

From technical alerts to financial impact

True resilience is built in the layers behind your employees. It is about an organisation’s capacity to minimise the impact of an attack that inevitably gets through. A key metric here is attacker ‘dwell time’ – the period from initial compromise to detection. The longer an attacker remains undetected, the more data they can steal, the more systems they can disrupt, and the higher the ultimate financial cost.

This is where capabilities like Managed Detection and Response (MDR) become a core business function. An effective MDR service operates 24/7 to hunt for threats and crush dwell time. It is the difference between a contained incident handled in hours and a headline-making breach that erodes market confidence and customer trust over months. Its value is not measured in technical alerts, but in reduced operational downtime and mitigated financial loss.

Rehearsing for the inevitable: A board-level duty

Hope is not a strategy. A resilient organisation assumes it will be breached and rehearses its response accordingly. An Incident Response (IR) plan cannot be a document left on a server; it must be a tested, living process understood across the business, not just within the IT department.

This is a matter of corporate governance. Under South Africa’s Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA), failure to manage a breach effectively carries significant regulatory and financial penalties. Who is authorised to speak to the regulator? Who manages communication with customers and the media? How does the executive team coordinate with the technical teams?

Answering these questions under the pressure of a live attack is a recipe for failure. Regular IR drills, involving legal, communications, and executive leadership, are a non-negotiable part of the board's fiduciary duty to protect the organisation.

A live balance sheet of digital risk

Cybersecurity has long been treated as a technical cost centre. To make strategic, risk-based decisions, the board needs a clear view of its security posture, framed in business terms. This is the goal of a modern approach like Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM).

Think of CTEM as a live balance sheet of your digital risk. Instead of relying on periodic scans, it provides an ongoing, prioritised view of your organisation's vulnerabilities. This enables leadership to allocate budget and resources effectively, focusing on fixing the weaknesses that pose the most significant threat to critical business operations.

It answers the fundamental question: "Where is our security budget delivering the greatest return on investment in terms of risk reduction?"

From awareness to action

Cybersecurity Awareness Month is a valuable initiative, but it must be a starting point, not the destination. Building genuine resilience requires a fundamental shift in perspective.

Business leaders must begin asking different questions of their security teams. Move the focus from awareness metrics to resilience capabilities. How quickly can we detect and respond to a breach? Have we pressure-tested our response plan with the executive team? Can we quantify our most critical risks in financial terms?

By focusing on rapid response, rehearsed recovery, and a risk-based view of security investments, South African organisations can move beyond awareness campaigns and build the enduring resilience needed to thrive in an era of escalating digital threats.

Richard Ford, Regional CTO (SA) at Integrity360

*** The views expressed here do not necessarily represent those of Independent Media or IOL.

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