A few years ago, I was brought on as a special advisor for a ransomware incident at a luxury real estate firm in Southern California. This was a high-profile operation—ultra-wealthy clientele, multi-million-dollar closings, complex financing structures.
They thought they were prepared.
They had backups. They had a DR plan.
But the moment the attack hit, it all fell apart.
Their CMS, accounting, and transaction systems went offline. Email stopped. Their backups were corrupted or inaccessible. The attackers had been inside for weeks, long enough to disable restore points before deploying the payload.
The firm paid the ransom. They got some of their data back. And for weeks, they ran their business on paper. What they had wasn’t resilience – it was misplaced confidence. And unfortunately, this is not unique to them. I’ve seen variations of this story across industries, across platforms, and across continents.
In 2025, cyber resilience is no longer about prevention. It’s about preparation, containment, and your ability to keep going when things go wrong. If you’re leading security, operations, or critical infrastructure today—especially on platforms like HPE NonStop and other mission-critical workloads—here are four hard realities you need to be ready for.
1. Expect a Breach to Happen – Fast
The average ransomware dwell time is now 44 minutes. That’s not a typo. That’s how long it takes from initial access to system-wide encryption or exfiltration.
Attackers in 2025 aren’t script kiddies sitting in their parents’ basements. They’re using AI to:
- Bypass MFA with synthetic identities
- Blend into normal traffic patterns
- Pivot across environments faster than your SOC can triage a ticket
They don’t need to break in through your firewall — they log in with compromised credentials found on the dark web because most companies still don’t follow best practices – and once they’re in, they act like they belong. If your infrastructure still assumes trust based on location, credentials or role, it’s already exposed. The only model that survives modern attack velocity is Zero Trust: no default access, no standing privileges, and no blind trust in identity or network boundaries.
2. Compliance No Longer Equals Safety — or Survival
Many organizations still treat compliance as a finish line. This is a recipe for disaster. Compliance is a backwards looking activity. Compliance is not security. I repeat – COMPLIANCE IS NOT SECURITY. Thankfully, regulations have evolved — and they now assume constant compromise.
In the EU, the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) requires financial institutions and their vendors to withstand and recover from disruptions while maintaining operational continuity. That means real-time detection, functional isolation, and tested response plans.
The Cyber Resilience Act extends this further: any software product offered in the EU must be secure by design, with lifecycle support, vulnerability disclosure procedures, and real accountability when things go wrong.
And in the payments world, PCI DSS 4.0.1 raises the bar from “pass an audit” to “prove you’re actively resilient”:
- Multi-Factor Authentication – EVERYWHERE!
- Dynamic account posture analysis
- File integrity monitoring and automated logging
These aren’t checkboxes anymore — they’re baseline capabilities for doing business. If you’re only secure enough to pass an audit, you’re not secure enough to survive a breach.
3. Critical Infrastructure Needs to Be Built to Fail — Intelligently
HPE NonStop’s reputation for rock-solid availability has earned it a central role in some of the world’s most critical infrastructures. Banks, retailers, payment processors, and governments rely on their fault tolerance to keep operations running 24/7. That same reliability, though, can lead to a natural assumption of invincibility — which is why even these trusted systems benefit from layered resilience strategies designed to detect, contain, and recover from modern threats.
In today’s threat environment, resilience isn’t just about preventing downtime — it’s about preparing for disruption. Even the most stable platforms benefit from Zero Trust principles that ensure survivability in the face of compromise.
Resilience doesn’t mean systems won’t break. It means they fail safely and recover quickly — without destroying the business in the process.
That means:
- Tying NonStop identity into enterprise-wide IAM systems
- Enforcing multi-factor authentication for all users and services
- Implementing least-privilege access, dynamically managed and revoked
- Monitoring for unauthorized changes at the system and application level
- Segmenting workloads to contain incidents instead of letting them spread
These capabilities don’t replace NonStop’s strength — they extend and modernize it, helping security and operations teams stay aligned with business and regulatory expectations.
I’ve seen organizations apply these controls to catch misused credentials in real time, flag insider threats before damage occurred, and maintain uptime through security events that would have paralyzed less-prepared environments.
Resilience doesn’t mean expecting failure. It means being ready for anything — even on systems designed to never miss a beat. You don’t need to rip and replace. You just need to stop trusting what shouldn’t be trusted.
4. AI-Powered Attacks Demand AI-Caliber Defense
Adversaries are now using AI to automate phishing, conduct social engineering campaigns at scale, generate malicious payloads, and evade detection in real time. If your controls rely on manual log review, rule-based logic, or signature matching, you’re outgunned.
Resilience in 2025 means:
- Detecting anomalies based on behavior, not just static rules
- Responding automatically to unusual privilege escalations or configuration changes
- Understanding the context of access — not just who, but why and when
The World Economic Forum’s Cyber Resilience Compass makes it clear: cyber resilience is not just a technical challenge — it’s a leadership one.
Every executive must ask:
Can we keep operating when – not if – we’re under attack?
If the answer involves hope, paperwork, or excuses, you already know the real answer.
You’re Not Building Security — You’re Buying Time
You can’t stop every breach. That’s not defeatist – it’s reality. But you can control what happens next. You can contain. You can recover. You can continue to serve customers when others are forced offline.
The organizations getting this right aren’t lucky — they’re prepared. They’ve stopped chasing silver bullets and vendor jargon and started building layered, resilient security models rooted in Zero Trust. You already know the threats. You have access to the partners who have the tools. The only question is: Are you using them to build something that can survive?
Join XYPRO and HPE this June at eBITUG in Dublin, Ireland and HPE Discover in Las Vegas where we’ll be speaking about how to move beyond static defenses and compliance checklists and into a security model that’s real-time, recovery-ready, and built for critical environments.
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