Premchand Kurup, CEO of ParamountAssure, emphasizes that strengthening cyber resilience requires organizations and governments to identify critical dependencies, align investments with business risk, enhance preparedness, and safeguard essential services against growing disruptions.
While these measure different forms of exposure, protecting essential services requires businesses and national authorities to prepare for consequences that extend beyond the organisation first targeted. That preparation starts with understanding the services others depend on.
Understand where disruption can travel
For instance, if an attack hits a shared payment provider, retailers could lose checkout services while transport and hospitality operators struggle to complete bookings. Each dependent business could suffer disruption with its own systems intact.
Mapping critical services should therefore reveal the infrastructure behind direct suppliers, including common identity or cloud providers. Two suppliers may offer little resilience if both depend on the same underlying platform. Assigning service owners and agreeing acceptable disruption limits gives leaders a basis for deciding which dependencies demand protection and which operations must recover first.
Align cyber investment with business risk
At company level, the CISO needs a view of cyber risk across the full portfolio of business services and their dependencies. This should shape a resilience strategy, with executive leadership agreeing acceptable risk and allocating budgets and specialist resources in proportion to the potential business consequences.
During an initial 48-hour review, business heads and IT should list what must keep working: critical services and the applications, identities, data and external dependencies supporting them. This should guide decisions on ownership, recovery priorities and acceptable data-loss limits.
The resilience plan should account for how supplier disruption could affect operations, customers and other businesses. It should distinguish what the organisation can control from risks that require supplier cooperation or contingency arrangements. Investment in alternatives should reflect whether they can sustain critical services when external providers fail.
These decisions require security evidence that can be translated into business consequences. AI-assisted investigation tools such as Paramount’s SoCMate can help connect fragmented evidence, giving security professionals context to support management decisions.
Some financial exposure will remain even after safeguards are strengthened. Risks arising outside the organisation’s control should also inform insurance decisions. Cyber insurance can address specified financial losses, subject to policy terms and exclusions, with cover assessed against realistic disruption scenarios. The CISO and executive leadership should understand which losses can be insured and which risks the business retains.
Responding to cyberattacks at national level
At national level, cyber resilience begins with understanding which disruptions could threaten public safety or interrupt essential services. That assessment should determine national priorities and the resources committed to protecting critical infrastructure, including providers whose failure could affect several sectors.
A designated national authority should establish clear responsibilities across government and industry, with regulators setting resilience expectations for payment systems and essential infrastructure, including electricity grids and data centres. These expectations should define acceptable disruption limits and the continuity and recovery capabilities operators must demonstrate. National investment can address capability gaps that individual operators struggle to close, particularly where smaller suppliers support services of public importance. Developing specialist skills and access to shared expertise strengthens that collective capacity.
Dependence on common technology providers also requires strategic scrutiny. Decisions about supplier diversification and domestic capability should reflect whether they meaningfully reduce shared exposure. Trusted arrangements for sharing threat intelligence can give national leaders a clearer picture of emerging risks and help direct support where it will have the greatest impact.
Preparedness also requires agreement on when disruption warrants a coordinated national response across sectors. A common approach to public communication supports confidence as authorities and businesses manage the wider consequences of an attack.
Make readiness a management discipline
Urgent controls need a timetable that leads to demonstrated capability. For instance, a 90-day programme to address the highest risks can include an executive or cross-sector exercise within the first 30 days. Suspected compromise requires immediate escalation regardless of where an organisation sits in that programme.
Exercises should test the first hour of an incident and the restoration of essential services. Leaders should examine actual recovery times and unresolved dependencies, then fund corrective actions with named owners. Regular review keeps weaknesses visible after the immediate sense of urgency fades.
What UAE preparedness should demonstrate
New technologies will bring complex threats, and protecting essential services will demand adaptation. The UAE’s work to develop local cyber capabilities and strengthen public awareness gives this response a foundation in both expertise and vigilance. Human ingenuity gives defenders the means to counter malicious intent. Sustaining that advantage requires tested defences and people who remain prepared to act on warning signs.