How Cyber Resilience & Disaster Recovery Are Not The Same

For years, organizations have comforted themselves with a familiar refrain: “We have disaster recovery.”
Backups exist. A DR plan is on file. A test was run at least once years ago.

And yet, when a ransomware attack, destructive data breach, or widespread outage occurs, many of those same organizations discover an uncomfortable truth: disaster recovery did not make them cyber resilient.

Cyber resilience is not about systems coming back online. It’s about the business surviving, operating, and maintaining trust while under attack. That distinction is where most organizations fall short.

Cyber Resilience vs. Disaster Recovery: What’s the difference?

Disaster Recovery (DR) was designed for a different era, one dominated by hardware failures, power outages, and natural disasters. (Cyber Recovery vs. Disaster Recovery: What’s the difference?, 2025) In those scenarios, systems failed accidentally. Data was assumed to be trustworthy. Data recovery meant restoring from the last known good state.

Disaster recovery is an important component of cyber resilience, but, on its own, it is not sufficient to address modern cyber threats. It is a traditional IT discipline focused on restoring systems and data after a disruptive event, enabling the organization to return to normal operations.

Disaster recovery is primarily reactive, emphasizing recovery capabilities through metrics such as Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO), and relying heavily on backups, data replication, and high availability or failover capabilities. (DR) Plans are designed primarily to address unplanned outages caused by hardware failures, natural disasters, or operational errors, and they assume that recovered data is trustworthy and that environments are safe to restore into.

At its core, the disaster recovery mindset asks a single question: “How quickly can we recover and get back up and running?”

Cyber resilience is a broader discipline that includes disaster recovery but also focuses on prevention, detection, secure recovery, and maintaining critical business functions during an attack. Unlike traditional DR, it assumes the environment may be compromised, and recovery must occur securely.

Cyber incidents fundamentally break that assumption.

In most cyberattacks:

• • Networks and systems may be breached
  • Data may be unavailable, corrupted, encrypted by ransomware, or exfiltrated.
  • Backups may be compromised or unusable.
  • Attackers may still be active during recovery.
  • Legal, regulatory, and reputational impacts begin immediately.

DR answers the question: “How fast can we restore IT systems?”

Cyber resilience answers a far more important question: “How does the business continue to function when systems, data, and trust are under cyberattack?”

What is Cyber Resilience?

Cyber resilience is the ability to anticipate, withstand, and recover from cyber attacks, disruptions,  and respond to them without losing control of the business.

NIST defines cyber resilience as the ability to anticipate, withstand, recover from, and adapt to adverse conditions and cyberattacks, ensuring that critical business functions continue even in compromised environments. It moves beyond prevention to operational continuity, integrating people, process, and technology to maintain functionality during disruption and recover quickly.

It is not a product. It is not a single plan. And it is not owned solely by IT.

Cyber resilience sits at the intersection of people, process, and technology.

People

• • Clear executive ownership of cyber risk
  • Defined decision-makers during a crisis
  • Leaders are trained to operate in uncertain environments.
  • Cross-functional coordination (IT, Security, Legal, Communications, Operations)

Process

• • Business Impact Analyses (BIAs) exist
  • Incident response plans aligned with recovery objectives
  • Legal and regulatory  are defined before an incident.
  • Forensic workflows are defined
  • Crisis communications plans that are documented, exercised, and not theoretical

Technology

• • Secure, isolated, and immutable backups
  • Identity and access controls that function during recovery
  • Visibility into threats, vulnerabilities, not just system availability
  • Recovery environments designed for cyber events, not just DR

Where Organizations Commonly Fail

Despite significant investments, most organizations struggle in predictable ways.

Backup Does Not Equal Recovery

Having backups is meaningless if:

• • They are encrypted by ransomware.
  • No one knows which version is clean.
  • Restoration takes weeks instead of hours.
  • Business priorities aren’t reflected in restore order.

Recovery Plans That Have Never Been Tested

Many organizations have plans that exist only on paper:

• • No executive has walked through a real cyber scenario.
  • Recovery objectives and timelines are undefined.
  • Dependencies between systems are not defined and assessed.
  • Third-party and cloud recovery plans are not tested.

No Senior Executive Ownership

Cyber resilience fails when it’s treated as:

• • An IT or Security responsibility
  • A compliance checkbox
  • A once-a-year tabletop exercise

Without senior leadership accountability, decisions during a crisis become slow, fragmented, and reactive, exactly when clarity matters most.

What “Practical” Cyber Resilience Looks Like

Resilient organizations behave differently before a cyber incident ever occurs.

Organizations perform Business Impact Analyses (BIAs) to identify which business functions truly matter, how long they can be unavailable before the wheels fall off, and which data is mission-critical—not just which systems exist.

They conduct wargaming and simulations that force executives to make decisions under pressure:
Do we shut systems down? Do we communicate publicly? Do we restore or rebuild?

They conduct regular recovery testing, including cyber-specific scenarios in which assumptions are deliberately challenged, and failure is expected.

They establish legal and forensic readiness, ensuring evidence preservation, regulatory notifications, and investigative workflows don’t conflict with recovery efforts.

Most importantly, they treat cyber resilience as a business capability rather than a technical project.

A Practical Starting Point: 3 Things Leaders Can Do in the Short-Term

Cyber resilience doesn’t require a multi-year transformation to begin. Leaders can take meaningful action immediately.

1. Assign Clear Senior Executive Ownership

Designate a senior executive accountable for cyber resilience, not just security. Define decision rights for cyber crises and ensure authority is understood before an incident occurs. In most organizations, these roles are typically assigned to the Chief Risk Officer (CRO), Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), or similar roles accountable for Risk Management.

2. Run Annual or Semi-Annual Realistic Simulations

Bring executives together for a scenario that assumes data compromise, regulatory pressure, and business disruption. Focus on decisions, tradeoffs, and communication, not technical details.

3. Validate Recovery Assumptions Regularly

Ask three hard questions:

• • Which systems must come back first, and why?
  • How do we know recovered data is trustworthy?
  • Can we operate the business while recovery is underway?

The answers often reveal the largest gaps.

Final Thought

Cyber resilience is not about preventing every incident. That’s unrealistic.
It’s about ensuring that when—not if—something happens, the organization can respond decisively, recover intelligently, and protect what matters most.

Disaster recovery helps systems survive, while cyber resilience helps the business survive.

In today’s threat landscape, that difference is everything.