Proactive Resilience: Don’t Wait for a Breach to Tell You What You Should Have Done

Summary

Proactive resilience is crucial, but most firms only test resilience after an incident. Aegis 9 | CDOR™ helps you assess the strength of your defences before an incident happens, with evidence your board can trust.

Remember M&S?
April 2025. One supplier. One ransomware-style attack.
£300 million in lost profits. Over £1 billion in market cap gone.
Not because M&S dropped the ball. But because a third-party did.

The lesson? You don’t need to be directly breached to get burned.

Why Proactive Resilience is Essential in Today's World

We live in a world of interconnected risk. It’s not just your systems you have to worry about; it’s your suppliers, their subcontractors, and everyone in your digital supply chain.

Resilience can’t wait for a regulator or a ransom note.
It needs to be proactive, continuous, and — crucially — measurable.

How Resilient Are You, Really?

If your teams can’t show that they’ve:

• Documented resilience plans
• Tested those plans with third parties
• Captured performance data
• Improved based on what they’ve learned

...then you’re not ready. Regulators will say it. Hackers will prove it.

What Regulators Want Now

With DORA in the EU and the UK’s Cyber Security & Resilience Bill breathing down the boardroom’s neck, you’re expected to:

• Involve the board
• Show your work (continuously)
• Align with standards such as ISO, COBIT, ITIL, not just mention them

This isn’t about box-ticking. It’s about showing that resilience is embedded, not just painted on after a breach.

Enter: The Aegis 9 | CDOR™ Framework

We built it to cut through the fluff.

With Aegis 9 | CDOR™, you can:

• Assess maturity across 20+ resilience domains
• Spot the gaps, from identity management to crisis comms
• Benchmark against global standards
• Drill down into specific business units, geographies, or vendors

It’s not a spreadsheet. It’s a resilience lens.
And it turns uncertainty into insight, and insight into action.

In one assessment, it reconciles the core demands of DORA, the UK's Cyber Security & Resilience Bill (CS&R), NIS2 and other regimes with best-practice controls drawn from ISO Standards, COBIT 2019 and ITIL 4.

That means you see, at a glance, how 20+ domains of governance, technology, third-party oversight and recovery really perform, where the material gaps sit, and which improvements will deliver the greatest risk-reduction for the least effort.

Because the CDOR framework scores process maturity and effectiveness, it transforms regulatory compliance from a retrospective box-ticking exercise into a forward-looking, data-driven roadmap. This aligns board risk appetite, budget, and operational priorities before a breach or supervisory intervention. This is proactive resilience in action.

Why Waiting is Risky

Too many firms learn their weak spots the hard way: after an outage, breach or third-party failure.

But resilience is now a Board issue. With legislation and regulation like DORA and NIS2, regulators want measurable outcomes, not just intentions.

So what? What should I do?

Being proactive isn’t just good governance, it’s self-defence. Start now to reduce exposure and show leadership that lasts beyond the next audit.

Book a free discovery session and explore the CDOR framework today.