Practical tip after practical tip followed. Quantify downtime in units the business understands. An automotive manufacturer could assemble a car in 57 seconds. A 90-minute outage translated directly into missed vehicles and lost revenue. Once framed that way, a resilience programme costing less than four hours of production became an easy decision.
Cloud, connectivity and concentration
The room also surfaced a more strategic dependency risk. Enterprises increasingly run on cloud, but cloud runs on networks. Connectivity outages and concentration risk can cascade across borders. Leaders urged governments and major buyers to press hyperscalers and telcos for clearer resilience guarantees, sovereign options where mandated, and joint exercises that assume simultaneous disruption of compute and connectivity.
Incident response and recovery that actually work
On the ground, the group offered a concise playbook for incident readiness that goes beyond PPT-ware:
• Map critical services and crown-jewel dependencies. Tie controls and drills to what truly keeps the business or the country running.
• Assume credentials will be stolen. Mandate phishing-resistant MFA for admin and high-risk roles, monitor for impossible travel and unusual access patterns and time-box privileged sessions.
• Engineer for clean recovery. Maintain golden images, out-of-band management planes and pre-staged, sealed build pipelines. Keep runbooks and emergency contacts offline, not only on SharePoint.
• Adopt immutable, isolated backups. Enforce retention beyond the likely dwell time of modern intrusions so‘ patient’ attackers cannot corrupt every restore point. Test restores under pressure.
• Control third-party access. Broker all vendor connectivity through hardened jump hosts with just-in-time credentials. Kill standing access and exposed RDP.
• Measure what matters. Track MTTD and MTTR, but also recovery assurance: how long to rebuild the minimum viable business if production is bricked.
• Rehearse with realism. Run cross-functional exercises that include legal, comms and executives. Inject hard scenarios such as destructive malware and simultaneous loss of identity services.
• Close the loop. Treat every alert, near miss and incident as a learning opportunity. Fix root causes, not just symptoms.
Hardening strategy for a volatile decade
Summing up, the panel argued for an evolution of mindset across the region. Compliance is the baseline. Resilience is the differentiator.
That evolution looks like this: intelligence-led defence, crown-jewel mapping, immutable backups, realistic recovery drills and relentless attention to identity and access.
It means treating planned downtime as a strategic investment rather than gambling on infinite uptime. It requires pragmatic regulation that pushes accountability to boards while enabling SMEs with templates, shared services and funding mechanisms. And above all, it demands cooperation – across government, regulators, critical operators, vendors and the C-level.
Two quotes lingered after the session. First, the stark reminder from the engineer who lived a nationstate strike:“ The purpose of those people who did this attack was not to earn money. It was to destroy.” Second, a practical mantra from a healthcare CISO who refuses to chase perfection at the expense of action: if one noisy alert turns out to be real, it can save lives.
In a region building the future at breathtaking speed, that is the measure that matters. Resilience is not an IT project. It is an economic and societal necessity.
Compliance is the baseline. Resilience is the differentiator.
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