Predicts 2026: Cybersecurity Program Rebrands to Cyber Resilience
11 December 2025 - ID G00841555 - 10 min read
By Arthur Sivanathan, Charlie Winckless, and 1 more
Cybersecurity leaders will rebrand their cybersecurity program as cyber resilience programs, signaling a shift from a narrow focus on incident prevention to a broader mandate of limiting business harm, focusing on what is critical, fueled by regulatory challenges, and ensuring operational continuity.
Overview
Key Findings
Cybersecurity leaders are repositioning their organizations by rebranding cybersecurity programs as cyber resilience programs. This strategic shift signals a move beyond traditional incident prevention, emphasizing a broader mandate to minimize business impact and ensure operational continuity in the face of increasingly complex and evolving cyberthreats.
Cybersecurity programs struggle to prioritize and focus protection of the most vital processes, given the breadth of assets to be secured.
Cybersecurity leaders are increasingly being asked to provide cross-functional coordination with IT and the business during recovery scenarios that result from cyberincidents.
Organizations often overlook hidden cloud dependencies in their cybersecurity controls, including those that seem on-premises but are actually cloud-tethered.
Recommendations
CISOs must proactively align leadership messaging, board communications, and team language to emphasize resilience over prevention, securing executive buy-in, and driving organizational change.
Prioritize and protect critical business assets by embedding cyber resilience into enterprise risk and recovery frameworks, routinely testing restoration capabilities, and actively engaging leadership to make resilience a core organizational objective.
As cybersecurity leaders’ remit expands, they must ensure new responsibilities are aligned with adequate resources and talent, and clearly define the scope of cyberincidents versus other disruptions to optimize collaboration and resilience.
Conduct a thorough audit of all cloud security controls to uncover hidden dependencies and ensure compliance with emerging sovereignty regulations.
Analysis
What You Need to Know
Cybersecurity is undergoing a mandatory and fundamental strategic shift rebranding as cyber resilience to address sophisticated threats, regulatory demands, and the inevitability of disruptive incidents. Cybersecurity leaders must immediately realign their cybersecurity strategy to prioritize limiting business harm, minimizing operational impact, and ensuring continuity rather than pursuing the unattainable goal of total prevention. Failure to act will expose organizations to regulatory penalties, increased recovery costs, and prolonged business disruptions. Increasingly stringent regulations around cyber resilience are driving cybersecurity leaders to rapidly ramp up their capabilities after years of underinvestment, including taking on additional responsibilities such as disaster recovery.
The four predictions that Gartner observes for cyber resilience in 2026 and beyond:
Embrace Recovery as a Core Mandate: Shift your focus from preventing every cyberincident to building robust preparedness and recovery capabilities. C-suite and organizational leaders must champion a harm-limiting approach, recognizing that not all attacks can be prevented, but their impact can be contained.
Consequence: Organizations that cling to outdated prevention-only models will find themselves unprepared for inevitable breaches, resulting in greater financial and reputational damage.
Aggressively Prioritize Critical Operations: Streamline your cybersecurity efforts to protect what matters most. With limited resources and increasing threats, you must identify and secure the assets that are essential to operational continuity.
Consequence: Spreading resources too thinly will leave critical operations vulnerable, increasing the risk of catastrophic business interruptions.
Expand the CISO Remit and Integrate Disaster Recovery: Rapidly enhance your cyber resilience capabilities to comply with stringent regulations, including integrating disaster recovery elements into the cybersecurity function. Treat disaster recovery as a collaborative effort, breaking down silos and fostering cross-functional coordination.
Consequence: Organizations that delay this integration will struggle to meet regulatory requirements and will be slower to recover from incidents, amplifying the negative impact.
Adopt Sovereignty-Aware Technology Strategies: Proactively adapt your security technology choices and deployment models to account for geopolitical pressures and local regulations. Develop sovereignty-aware strategies, even for environments that appear on-premises, due to the increasing prevalence of cloud-tethered security controls.
Consequence: Ignoring geopolitical and regulatory shifts will result in compliance failures and may force costly, unplanned technology overhauls.
Strategic Planning Assumptions
Strategic Planning Assumption: By 2028, half of CISOs will formally rebrand their cybersecurity program as cyber resilience programs.
Analysis By: Will Candrick
Key Findings:
Cybersecurity’s new mandate is to limit harm, not prevent incidents. Cyber resilience takes a broader view of cybersecurity, focused on minimizing the harm of cyber risk on business goals and outcomes as opposed to narrowly focusing on protecting against incidents.
Cyber resilience demands a reevaluation of investment priorities. The expanded view of cyber resilience reveals shifting investment priorities. For example, across the six core NIST CSF 2.0 functions, the biggest maturity gap is “respond,” not “protect.”
Market Implications
Cyber resilience marketing hype will expand. CISOs and their teams must brace for exponential growth in cyber resilience marketing hype similar to the “AI-ification” most vendors have undergone. Like AI, cyber resilience is both a legitimate transformation for cybersecurity and a source of overhyped marketing.
Leadership expectations of the CISO are also transforming. The CISOs’ remit is evolving in response to fundamental changes in cybersecurity. CISOs are increasingly expected to serve as true officers of the enterprise serving a business, not just technology, role.
Recommendations:
Pivot cybersecurity’s core mandate to cyber resilience. CISOs and their teams must proactively reset cybersecurity’s remit in anticipation of evolving leadership expectations. Board presentations, committee meetings, and leadership conversations are all opportunities to gain buy-in on cybersecurity’s new mandate.
Adopt resilience language across all leadership messaging. Cyber resilience must be core to how CISOs and their team talk about cybersecurity. Shift common language from “if we have a breach” to “when we have a break,” “we’re reducing risk” to “we’re maximizing resilience,” and “our top cyber risks are” to “our cyber resilience strategy is.”
Related Research:
Strategic Planning Assumption: By 2028, 40% of cyber leaders will streamline their resilience efforts to only focus on critical operations and business services due to a lack of skilled resources and funding.
Analysis by: Arthur Sivanathan
Key Findings:
The majority of cybersecurity programs will transition from focusing on prevention to one focusing on resilience, ensuring rapid recovery or continuity for essential operations, minimizing the harm resulting from inevitable disruptions.
Cybersecurity leaders will increasingly concentrate resources on protecting critical business services, reducing or altogether eliminating resilience investment in nonessential assets to optimize risk management and operational impact.
Organizations with mature cyber resilience programs will differentiate themselves in the market by demonstrating a better ability to recover from disruptions than their peers in a world where everyone understands that disruption is inevitable.
Market Implications
Existing providers in business continuity management, enterprise architecture tools, and asset and inventory management will expand their software capabilities to provide automated business impact assessments, meeting increased demand for real-time visibility and impact from cyberincidents.
Regulators will continue to strengthen/tighten requirements to emphasize resilience and recovery capabilities, compelling organizations to demonstrate operational resilience of critical systems during cyberincidents.
Demand will increase for external testing and support, particularly in the form of technical testing services, such as red teaming (Europe already has TIBER and CBEST testing). With regulators mandating external testing, there will be increased demand.
Recommendations
Leveraging existing mapping of essential critical business processes and assets, leveraging risk assessments like Business Impact Assessments (BIA), to ensure cybersecurity investments and controls are focused on prioritizing cybersecurity controls for these areas.
If BIAs are incomplete, outdated, or inaccurate, start presenting cyber resilience gaps to the Board and C-Suite to ensure there’s no plausible deniability (and work with the organization to generate the resources to complete BIAs comprehensively).
Work with adjacent functions and consider establishing a resilience RASCI to embed cyber resilience objectives into enterprise risk management, incident response, and business continuity frameworks, with clear accountability and cross-functional collaboration.
Related Research
Strategic Planning Assumption: By 2028, 50% of CISOs will be asked to own disaster recovery, in addition to incident response, reflecting a broader organizational focus on cyber resilience.
Analysis By: Will Candrick
Key Findings:
Leadership prioritizes cyberincident preparedness over just prevention. Boards and C-suites’ view on risk mitigation has matured from a simplistic and unachievable prevention mindset to a broader focus on preparedness before, during, and after successful cyberattacks.
Disaster recovery is a team sport, not an isolated capability. CISOs must overcome traditional, siloed approaches to managing incident response and business continuity. Disaster recovery demands closer coordination and orchestration between leaders, technical experts, tools, and processes.
Market Implications
Cyberstorage will become mainstream for cybersecurity. Cyberstorage embeds advanced security directly into enterprise storage systems, enabling CISOs to proactively protect critical data across on-premises, edge, and cloud environments. This boosts confidence and trust that backups are clean and recent, and helps CISOs improve disaster recovery before an incident actually occurs.
Source code escrow agreements will expand in popularity. Disaster recovery spans third parties as well. When a third-party goes offline or suffers a breach, the enterprise faces an urgent need to recover. CISOs and their teams will increasingly use source code escrow agreements to ensure the enterprise can spin up and run services if the third party itself is unable to return to operational service.
Recommendations:
Related Research:
Strategic Planning Assumption: By 2027, 30% of organizations will require comprehensive sovereignty data, operational, or even technical sovereignty of their cloud-tethered security controls to address continued geopolitical turmoil.
Analysis By: Charlie Winckless
Key Findings:
Geopolitical turmoil and local regulations (such as China’s Cybersecurity Law Article 37, the provisions and controls around GDPR, India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act) are requiring many organizations to make sovereignty a key part of their cyber resilience approach.
Sovereignty requirements may extend beyond just data and may include either or both of operational and technical sovereignty requirements.
Many security solutions require cloud-tethering for their control plane and often key functionality. This extends sovereignty requirements beyond the obvious and into areas that may appear to be on-premises.
Market Implications
Shifting regulations and requirements will necessitate changes in vendor selection for cloud-tethered offerings and prioritization efforts as geopatriation requirements intensify.
In many geographies, full sovereignty (especially operational and technical requirements) will force compromises as you select cloud-tethered offerings. Those that meet your sovereignty objectives may lack technical capabilities compared to more widely available offerings, and cloud-tethered offerings that are tied to specific geographies may have fewer resiliency capabilities in the event of provider issues.
Ensure that the global providers you are purchasing from have the necessary documentation and validated support for their sovereignty requirements. Data sovereignty is easiest to address, but it will not be present for all vendors.
Recommendations:
Educate yourself on geopatriation and sovereignty requirements by consulting with legal counsel to ensure you have a clear understanding of any regulations that may be applicable to your organization.
Evaluate and define your organizational sovereignty objectives, including those required by local regulations and any internal policy decisions. Be aware, as you do so, that sovereign solutions will often result in compromises to resilience and technical capabilities. Ensure that these limitations are clearly understood and communicated.
Ensure you identify and categorize your non-obvious cloud dependencies by conducting a discovery effort on your security infrastructure. Validate the complex web of interdependencies these providers present against your requirements.
Related Research:
A Look Back
In response to your requests, we are taking a look back at some key predictions from previous years. We have intentionally selected predictions from opposite ends of the scale — one where we were wholly or largely on target, as well as one we missed.
This report is too new to have on-target or missed predictions.