4 Biggest Challenges to Cyber Resilience (and How to Overcome Them)

No business today is completely safe from cyberthreats. Attack vectors are constantly evolving — from phishing and credential theft to ransomware and supply chain attacks — and despite your best efforts, even a simple oversight, misconfiguration, or unpatched system can leave your business vulnerable to a breach. That's why cyber resilience is so critical: your ability to withstand, respond to, and recover from an incident directly impacts the future of your business.

It's no longer just about preventing cyberattacks but also about how you prepare your business to respond to and recover from potential cyber incidents when they do occur. A resilient organization assumes that something will eventually get through and plans accordingly — with layered defenses, tested backups and recovery plans, and clear roles and responsibilities when an incident happens.

However, achieving cyber resilience comes with a unique set of challenges, which we'll explore in this blog. But first, let's look at why businesses must implement cyber resilience.

Why is cyber resilience so important?

Here’s why cyber resilience is so important for you and your business:

Protection: Imagine losing access to all your critical data or getting locked out of your systems without a backup plan. It’s a nightmare scenario, right? Cyber resilience is what stands between your business and this potential disaster. By combining strong security controls with reliable backup and recovery, you reduce the impact of attacks and avoid permanent data loss.

Continuity: You want your business to continue critical operations even when things go wrong — whether that’s a ransomware attack, server failure, or accidental data deletion. Cyber resilience keeps you “on” even when everything is down by prioritizing essential systems, maintaining secure offsite backups, and having clear recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTOs and RPOs) aligned with your business needs.

Reputation: Cyberattacks can ruin your reputation. A single incident handled poorly can damage customer trust, vendor relationships, and even employee confidence. Cyber resilience helps protect the trust you’ve built by enabling you to respond quickly, communicate clearly, and demonstrate that you take security seriously and have a plan in place.

Compliance: Resilience helps you stay on the right side of regulations and avoid legal penalties and lawsuits. Many frameworks and regulations — such as HIPAA, FTC Safeguards Rule, SOX, ABA, CMMC, PCI and others — expect organizations to have not just preventive controls, but also incident response, logging and monitoring, and tested backup and disaster recovery capabilities. A strong cyber resilience strategy supports these requirements and provides evidence during audits.

Hurdles in achieving cyber resilience

Often, many businesses struggle with building cyber resilience. Limited internal IT resources, legacy systems, and competing priorities can slow progress or leave gaps. Here are some common challenges, along with strategies for overcoming them:

Evolving Threat Landscape: Cybercriminals always have new tricks up their sleeves, making it difficult for you to keep up with evolving threats. Ransomware-as-a-service, business email compromise, and targeted attacks on remote workers are just a few examples. However, for the sake of your business, it’s important to find a way to stay ahead of attackers and reduce the damage when something slips through.

How you can stay protected:

• Perform regular patching and keep your operating systems, applications, firewalls, and network devices updated.
• Maintain an accurate inventory of your assets so you know what needs to be patched and protected.
• Subscribe to trusted cybersecurity advisories and updates so you’re aware of the latest vulnerabilities and attack trends.
• Implement layered security controls (endpoint protection, email security, MFA, web filtering, and network segmentation) so a single failure doesn’t expose your entire environment.

Resource constraints: Many businesses don’t leave enough room in the budget for cybersecurity or hiring a dedicated IT and security team, which leaves them vulnerable to threats. That doesn’t mean you’re powerless. The good news is that there’s a lot you can do to make things difficult for cybercriminals and significantly reduce risk, even with a smaller budget.

How to work with what you have:

• Train your employees to be your first line of defense. Focus on phishing awareness, safe browsing, handling sensitive data, and reporting suspicious activity quickly.
• Enforce basic security hygiene such as multi-factor authentication (MFA), least-privilege access, and endpoint protection across all devices.
• Standardize and lock down your environment as much as possible — fewer device types and software variants are easier and cheaper to secure.
• Consider partnering with a reliable IT service provider that can deliver managed security, monitoring, and backup at a predictable monthly cost instead of trying to build everything in-house.

Complexity: It can be overwhelming to integrate cyber resilience into every aspect of your business, especially if you don’t have an IT or security background. Modern environments often include on-premises servers, cloud applications, remote workers, and multiple vendors. Trying to stitch all of this together while interpreting technical jargon can make things difficult for many SMB leaders.

How to simplify it:

• Adopt proven frameworks like the NIST Cybersecurity Framework to organize your efforts around clear functions: Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond, and Recover. This helps you see where you’re strong and where you have gaps.
• Start with a focused risk assessment to understand your most critical systems, data, and processes — then prioritize controls that protect those first.
• Use automation and easy-to-use security tools to handle repetitive tasks like patching, monitoring, and alerting so your team isn’t buried in manual work.
• Standardize your technology stack (workstations, servers, cloud platforms, and security tools) to reduce complexity, improve reliability, and make support more consistent.

Awareness: The best security tools are useless if your employees aren’t aware of the risks. Often, they lack the training to understand how their actions — clicking a suspicious link, reusing passwords, emailing sensitive files to personal accounts — can compromise your business. Human error remains one of the most common causes of security incidents.

How to fix this:

• Implement strict password controls, including password managers, minimum complexity and rotation policies where appropriate, and mandatory use of MFA for email, remote access, and business-critical systems.
• Make security training mandatory for everyone, from leadership to front-line staff, with short, recurring sessions instead of one-time events.
• Run phishing simulations and follow up with quick coaching so employees learn from real-world scenarios in a low-risk environment.
• Establish and communicate a clear policy for reporting suspicious emails, lost devices, and potential incidents — and make it easy for employees to speak up without fear of blame.

Master cyber resilience

Implementing cyber resilience isn’t a one-time effort; it’s an ongoing process that requires dedication, adaptability, and a proactive approach. Threats evolve, your technology stack changes, and regulatory expectations grow over time. Your strategy needs regular reviews, testing, and updates to stay effective.

You don’t have to tackle this alone. Consider partnering with an experienced IT service provider like us that understands both day-to-day IT operations and advanced cybersecurity, compliance, and backup strategies. We can help you assess your current posture, prioritize the right projects, and put practical, tested safeguards in place.

Contact us to learn how our IT experts can help you achieve cyber resilience with managed security, continuous monitoring, and proven backup and recovery. Schedule a free consultation and start securing your business today.