Cyber Resilience | GSA Global

Surviving a major cyber attack with a cyber lifeboat

How can a “Cyber Lifeboat” strengthen your business’ resilience and ensure its survival after a major cyber-attack?

As firms have grown increasingly dependent on interconnected systems, the likelihood and impact of a major cyber disruption have never been higher. The question is no longer if a disruptive attack will occur, but when. The firms that emerge strongest are those that plan ahead, build the capability to operate under technical and operational pressure, and simplify their recovery pathway.

At GSA, we help businesses design and build cyber lifeboats. These provide simplified, pre-planned operating environments that allow you to keep your most critical services running while you respond to the attack and then recover. They enable your leadership team to maintain control, communicate effectively, and serve customers and protect your reputation during a major disruption.

Building Cyber Resilience To Withstand Disruptive Attacks

GSA works with firms in all sectors, and public sector organisations, to develop practical and robust cyber resilience programmes. Our consultants work with management teams to understand the distinctive requirements and priorities for businesses in financial services, technology, manufacturing, retail, transport and public service provision.

We help leadership teams understand their critical service, system and third-party dependencies, develop robust contingency plans, simplify recovery structures, and build confidence in their ability to respond effectively when systems fail.

Why “Cyber Lifeboats” Are Needed

A cyber lifeboat is a pre-designed operational model that can be launched rapidly when your systems, or the systems of a critical third-party service provider, are compromised. It is not a replacement for Business Continuity or Disaster Recovery planning – which remain necessary preparations for natural disasters and technical failures. Rather, it is a critical component of cyber incident response planning – to deal with the consequences of a deliberate attack by an intelligent adversary.

As Archie Norman, Chairman of M&S, reflected after the recent major incident: “The one thing I wished had been in place was a lifeboat.”

However, building a lifeboat while the ship is sinking is incredibly difficult. By designing one in advance, when time and resources are on your side, your organisation can respond to disruptive attack decisively, mitigate damage and be confident of recovery.

Designing And Building The Lifeboat

The approach is simple: identify your Minimum Viable Business (MVB), the essential functions, people, processes and data that must survive any disruption. Design the systems, processes and organisation to deliver these priorities, ensuring that it can be activated quickly and that everyone understands their role.

The Lifeboat should complement, be consistent with and potentially require changes to, Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery resources and processes.

The strength of a Cyber Lifeboat lies in its simplicity. It should be easy to deploy, operate, and sustain. A lifeboat environment does not attempt to replicate your entire IT platform and business operations; instead, it focuses on keeping only the most vital services available while the wider response and recovery takes place.

Understanding The Need For A Lifeboat

The starting point for the design of a lifeboat is a clear understanding of the threats facing, and risks for, your organisation. This includes reviewing potential technology vulnerabilities, assessing operational dependencies, and identifying unacceptable residual business risks. Leadership agreement is crucial and without top-management alignment, lifeboat and other resilience initiatives often stall.

A robust assessment of the technical, operational, organisational, and financial impacts of a cyber incident provides the foundation for a well-informed resilience strategy.

Clarifying The Dependencies

Once the risks are understood, the next step is to define a Minimum Viable Business (MVB). This includes a clear description of the minimum services and business offerings needed to retain customer confidence, and the data, systems, processes and organisation needed to deliver these services and offerings.

Defining the MVB requires active engagement of business and functional leaders to secure buy-in from all key stakeholders.

Business operations input is critical for data triage and prioritisation, ensuring that the information critical to lifeboat operations is both accessible and secure. Business operations input is also key to making sure that essential processes and organisational resources are identified. Finally, a minimum technology requirements review helps to highlight areas where simplification will improve resilience.

Strategic Options For Lifeboat Programmes

Every organisation’s path to resilience is different.

A partnered lifeboat model can provide pre-arranged capacity through trusted external providers, while hybrid models combine internal and external resources to deliver flexibility.

Regardless of the model, the success of any lifeboat strategy depends on regular exercising. Playbooks and simulations allow teams to test their response under realistic conditions and build confidence in their ability to act when it matters most.

How GSA Helps Clients Build Cyber Resilience

GSA cyber resilience leaders have exceptional experience in advising on cyber incidents, recovery and resilience. They bring decades of business and technical management and cyber crisis advisory experience.

GSA brings independence and front-line technical experience and expertise – to help shape, select and procure, and deliver the most appropriate business technical solutions. GSA brings highly experienced senior teams that work closely “hands on” with boards, business and technical leaders, bringing the benefit of their experience and insights to build pragmatic, robust cyber resilience.

GSA provides a structured, end-to-end approach to lifeboat planning and cyber resilience development. Our services include:

* Cyber disruption assessments, mapping vulnerabilities, dependencies, and potential loss scenarios.

* Executive briefings to help business leadership teams understand the implications of major incidents and can make informed investment decisions.

* Tailored MVB design workshops to help define what must be protected and why, and how best to ensure that these critical minimum business operations can be delivered in the event of a major disruptive attack.

Our technical specialists and business partners assist with architecture design, ensuring that the lifeboat platform remains simple, secure, and rapid to deploy. We also provide guidance on data storage, “hydration”, and access, making sure essential data can be restored quickly when required.

Finally, GSA supports implementation, testing, and training, embedding the lifeboat into your existing Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery frameworks. We run real-world exercises with your teams so that firms can be confident that, in the event of a major attack, the lifeboat can be launched and the business protected.

Business Value From Risk Reduction

Organisations that adopt the lifeboat model achieve faster recovery, reduced operational disruption, and greater control in the aftermath of a cyber attack. They gain clarity on which systems and data are truly critical, along with a simple, tested plan that can be launched within hours rather than weeks.

The result is a tangible improvement in cyber resilience maturity, increased confidence from boards and regulators, and stronger trust from customers and partners.

Next Steps

To begin strengthening your resilience, GSA recommends three immediate steps:

* Book an Executive Cyber Resilience Briefing to test your organisation’s current planning and assumptions.

* Run a Minimum Viable Business Workshop with our experts to define your lifeboat scope.

* Integrate and rehearse your plan alongside existing Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery frameworks.

Get in touch today to discuss how GSA Global can help your organisation prepare, survive, and rapidly recover in the face of a major cyber-attack.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What is cyber resilience?

Cyber resilience is an organisation’s ability to prepare for, respond to, and recover from cyber attacks while maintaining critical operations and services.

Why do organisations need cyber resilience planning?

As digital dependence grows, cyber disruptions can halt operations. A tested resilience plan reduces downtime, protects reputation, and ensures faster recovery.

How does GSA help organisations build cyber resilience?

GSA designs and delivers tailored cyber resilience programmes, including Cyber Lifeboat planning, Minimum Viable Business (MVB) workshops, testing, and executive briefings.

What are the first steps to improving cyber resilience?

Start with an executive briefing to assess your current preparedness, define your MVB, and test your response against a realistic cyber incident scenario.