Building an Effective Security Strategy | Gavan Egan & Raluca Saceanu on Cyber Resilience

There are five key pillars: proactive security (hardened environments, patch management, network segmentation), identity and human layer governance, operational threat intelligence, operational resilience and incident testing, and ensuring your security strategy drives your technology choices rather than the other way around. AI is also rapidly becoming a critical sixth consideration.

AI has dramatically improved attack quality. Threat actors now craft grammatically perfect, contextually aware, and highly targeted communications, including convincing voice and video impersonations. Technical controls like MFA, conditional access policies, and zero trust principles are now essential complements to any awareness program.

MDR bridges the gap between what a security strategy says on paper and what actually happens when something fires at 2am. It provides round-the-clock expertise across hundreds of environments, enabling fast detection and containment, and delivers the evidence-based reporting needed for board-level confidence.

Key metrics include mean time to respond, mean time to contain, MFA coverage across privileged accounts, and vulnerability patching speed by severity. These are far more meaningful indicators than simply counting the number of security tools deployed.

True resilience requires mapping critical dependencies, understanding which systems or third parties would threaten operations if disrupted, and regularly testing incident response with the right people in the room, including senior leadership. Organizations that handle major incidents well are typically those that have practiced, not those with the most sophisticated technology.