The digital threat landscape in Poland has ceased to be the domain of theoretical considerations and has become an everyday business challenge. Official statistics, such as those published by CERT Polska, break records for the number of recorded incidents every year.
Companies, regardless of the scale of their operations, confront constant pressure – from mass phishing campaigns to precisely targeted ransomware attacks. It is no longer just data or financial losses that are at stake, but the fundamental ability to do business.
For years, the IT industry was dominated by the paradigm of building a digital fortress. Investments were focused on strengthening the fortress walls: deploying advanced firewalls, anti-virus systems and the increasingly popularZero Trust architectures.
These are solid foundations, but the industry agrees that even the most airtight defence system does not guarantee 100 per cent protection. The question has ceased to be “will we be attacked?” and has started to be “when will it happen and how quickly will we get back into action?”.
In response to this change, the concept of cyber resilience is coming to the fore. This is a strategic extension of the classic notion of security. While security focuses on prevention and blocking attacks, resilience assumes that an incident will eventually occur.
Its goal is therefore to minimise damage, survive the disruption and return to full operations as soon as possible. Resilience is the ability of an organisation to absorb the blow and continue the mission.
Implementing this concept requires an integrated, holistic approach that can be based on several complementary pillars. The first is continuous analysis and prevention. This includes regular assessment of threat vectors, identification of vulnerabilities in the infrastructure and attention to compliance with regulations and standards. It is proactive action that reduces the attack surface.
The second element, reinforcing prevention, is the aforementioned Zero Trust architecture. Its philosophy rejects the idea of a secure internal network, treating any attempt to access resources – regardless of origin – as potentially hostile.
Authentication and authorisation become granular, making it significantly more difficult for attackers to move around the network, even if they manage to penetrate the first line of defence.
Another two pillars are activated when prevention proves insufficient. We are talking about detection and response capabilities. Key here is the continuous monitoring of systems in search of anomalies that may be indicative of an incident. Rapid detection allows pre-defined response procedures to be triggered, isolating the threat before it causes cascading damage.
The final key element is recovery. This is the process of restoring systems, data and business processes to their pre-attack state. Modern disaster recovery strategies emphasise automation and minimising Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) metrics to keep business interruption as short as possible.
However, building true cyber resilience goes beyond technology. It is a process that must integrate people, procedures and tools. It requires clearly defined roles in the event of a crisis, regular testing and emergency drills, and building a culture of security awareness among all employees. Security is no longer a product that can be bought and implemented. It has become a continuous process of adaptation that determines a company’s ability to survive in an increasingly uncertain digital world.
