Top 5 Cyber Resilience Roadblocks (and How to Navigate Them)

If you’ve been following along with our blog series on cyber resilience (or have been paying attention to the dizzying evolution of the threat landscape), you know it’s important to start planning for when a cyberattack occurs, not if.

You’re bought in — you’re an evangelist about the importance of having a culture that’s security-aware; having solid foundational security practices; regularly assessing detection and defensive capabilities; having crisis management plans in place, documented and tested.

But security isn’t about what’s possible when all the stars align. Where do you start when you’re short on time, people, budget and buy-in? How do you move from “security whack-a-mole” to a plan that you live and breathe every day? How do you bring others along on the journey?

Let’s get into it with this post, which will explore the most common barriers to cyber resilience and some ways to overcome them.

Roadblock 1: Understaffed and Overworked

The Challenge: There aren’t enough hours in the day for you to do all the things you have to do, let alone pursue those projects that have been collecting dust on your to-do list because they’re not centered around putting out fires or meeting regulatory requirements. Hiring and onboarding qualified folks is slow and painful, if you even have the luxury of adding or backfilling positions. Incident response takes longer than you know it should. You know you have monitoring gaps, but you don’t know which ones will actually hurt you. You’re starting to forget when you took that last full week of PTO.

Mitigation Strategies: 

• Upskill Existing Staff: If adding headcount isn’t in the cards, focus on retaining and upskilling your existing staff by investing in training (TryHackMe or HackTheBox are two great options) to build security expertise. This also puts you in a better position to promote from within and offer career development paths. 
• Leverage Managed Security Services: Partner with a Managed Security Service Provider to augment your team's capabilities. This is more cost-effective than hiring a full-time senior-level staff person and allows you to tap into the expertise of specialists with mature processes who can take some of the day-to-day operational security work off your plate. 
• Automate What’s Possible: Implement security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) solutions to handle low-level routine tasks like alert triage, false-positive filtering and initial incident response steps. This helps reduce noise and frees up your limited human resources to focus on high-impact strategic work.

How It Builds Resilience: You’re able to spend less time being reactive and can shift focus to high-impact, proactive activities. 

Roadblock 2: Budget Constraints and the "Cost Center" Mentality

The Challenge: Your team’s efforts are viewed as a cost center rather than a strategic advantage, making it difficult for you to justify budget increases for new technologies, staffing or training. Your team is consulted late in the process for new projects, forcing you into the role of “gatekeeper” or “enforcer.” The irony is that this approach ends up costing more in the long term because it results in delays, expensive rework and last-minute compromises on security (too bad “I told you so” isn’t a good look). 

Mitigation Strategies:

• Quantify Risk and Business Impact: Use a risk-based approach to prioritize spending. Present security investments not as expenses, but as a way to protect revenue, brand reputation and operational continuity. Move away from technical jargon and instead communicate risk in financial, operational and strategic business terms.
• Adopt a "Return on Controls" (ROC) Mindset:  Prioritize security measures that offer the highest return on investment, such as multi-factor authentication (MFA) and privileged access management (PAM), which can significantly reduce risk for a relatively low cost.
• Explore Open-Source and Cloud-Native Solutions: Leverage effective open-source tools and the security features already built into your cloud environments to maximize your existing technology stack without major new investments.

How It Builds Resilience: By leveraging low-cost tools, you can invest your limited budget more strategically. And when you translate technical needs into business risk and ROI, the board starts nodding along and investing in what really matters. 

Roadblock 3: Supply Chain and Third-Party Risk

The Challenge: Your business increasingly relies on a complex ecosystem of vendors, SaaS providers and partners. At the same time, software supply-chain attacks are seemingly everywhere thanks to unpatched vulnerabilities, cloud security threats and the skyrocketing use of AI-based phishing. All of this adds up to more cyber risk surface than ever before, and the potential for cascading failures and regulatory exposure. It’s hard to sleep at night if you think too much about how a single breach in your supply chain could have catastrophic consequences for your operations.

Mitigation Strategies:

• Implement a Vendor Risk Management Program: Before onboarding a new vendor, conduct a thorough security assessment. Request and review SOC 2 reports, penetration test results, and other relevant security attestations, paying special attention to those providing privileged access.
• Establish Clear Access Controls: Apply network segmentation, and limit third-party access to your network and data to only what is absolutely necessary to help reduce the blast radius.
• Continuous Monitoring: Continuously monitor the security posture of your key vendors, deploy immutable backups and conduct frequent penetration testing.
• Plan for “What If”: Game out different scenarios in cyber tabletop exercises, including vendor compromise and cascading effects.

How It Builds Resilience: It’s not possible to prevent third-party attacks, but vigilance, preparation and solid controls can help reduce both the likelihood and potential impact of these incidents.

Roadblock 4: The Evolving Threat Landscape

The Challenge: You knew we’d get around to AI and ransomware eventually, right? Everywhere you turn, you’re hearing about how threat actors are using ever-more sophisticated tools, including generative AI, to create frighteningly realistic phishing attacks and more resilient malware (if you need convincing, check out all the nice things Bob Ross said about us). You’re worried that traditional defenses are ineffective against this overwhelming flood of new threats. 

Mitigation Strategies:

• Focus on Education and Training: According to Verizon DBIR data, human factors account for approximately 85% of successful breaches. Ensure your employees are using unique, complex passwords; can generally spot suspicious emails; and feel comfortable with the escalation procedures for suspicious communications. 
• Invest in High-Quality Penetration Testing: Ensure your pentesting vendor is simulating the TTPs (tactics, techniques and procedures) used in today’s attacks, proactively testing your environment under real-world conditions.
• Focus on Detection and Response, Not Just Prevention: Breaches are inevitable, so it’s equally important to focus your energy on detection and mitigation. Purple Team exercises can fine tune detection capabilities. Invest in robust backup and recovery systems, and regularly test your incident response plan with tabletop exercises.
• Operationalize Threat Intelligence: Stay informed about the latest threats and attack vectors relevant to your industry and business size. Use this intelligence to adjust your security controls and defenses proactively.

How It Builds Resilience: Even in the face of a rapidly evolving threat landscape, you can anticipate and make successful attacks less likely with the right tools, skilled personnel and well-rehearsed processes.

Roadblock 5: People and Politics

The Challenge: Even the best technology and the sharpest security strategies crumble without alignment across teams. Turf wars, unclear ownership and competing priorities can create invisible gaps that attackers happily exploit. Executives may say security is a priority but balk when controls slow down go-to-market timelines. Security teams are sometimes painted as “the department of no,” alienating them from the business they’re meant to protect. You might also face resistance from employees who view security policies as obstacles to productivity. The politics of influence, perception and power can quietly undermine technical progress faster than any zero-day exploit.

Mitigation Strategies:

• Build Coalitions, Not Silos: Establish relationships across departments before crises hit. Engage with legal, HR, finance and product/service leaders early in decision cycles so security concerns are baked in, not bolted on. Shared accountability removes the “us vs. them” dynamic.
• Rebrand Security as Enablement: Position security as a business enabler that accelerates trust, compliance and customer confidence. Highlight examples where proactive security created measurable operational or reputational advantages.
• Establish Clear Governance: Define decision rights, escalation paths and ownership across the organization. When everyone knows who decides what — and why — conflicts dissipate and execution improves.
• Leverage Internal Champions: Identify influential voices within each team who can advocate for security. A peer champion inside engineering or marketing can translate your goals into their team’s language more effectively than top-down mandates.
• Measure and Communicate Impact: Track and regularly report security metrics that align with business outcomes — reduced downtime, improved customer trust scores, faster recovery times. Replace technical jargon with clear, value-driven narratives.

How It Builds Resilience: Security becomes part of organizational DNA rather than an external imposition. By aligning incentives, clarifying ownership and embedding security thinking across the enterprise, you create a culture that naturally resists fragmentation, sustains cooperation and weathers crises without fracturing.

Summing It All Up

Cyber resilience isn’t a finish line — it’s an evolving discipline built on strategy, adaptability and shared responsibility. By tackling the roadblocks of limited staffing, constrained budgets, third-party exposure, shifting threats and internal politics, you move beyond reactive defense into sustained strategic and operational strength. The result is a security program that not only protects the organization but reinforces its ability to adapt, recover and thrive amid constant change.

Want to talk about your organization's biggest cyber resilience challenges? Schedule a call.

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Publish Date: October 23, 2025