Written by Archana Choudhary
In 2024, a single faulty software update from CrowdStrike erased more than US$10 billion in market value across the Fortune 500 in under 72 hours. A ransomware attack on Change Healthcare wiped nearly US$2 billion off its parent company’s EBITDA. For modern banks, cyber incidents are no longer IT headaches, they are existential business events that can impair revenue, erode customer trust, and trigger regulatory sanctions within hours.
Cyber resilience is no longer a technology investment. A minute of downtime may cost millions. Downtime refers to the time when network, critical systems or operation is unavailable. This results in halting of revenue generation. Downtime in bank has a direct, quantifiable impact on revenue, trust, regulatory risk. Even short outages on critical services like payments, online banking, card transactions triggers customer loss, missed trading opportunity, potential compensation to customers. Negative media and social coverage may damage brand perception far beyond the duration of incident, affecting new customer acquisition.
Banks must manage cyber resilience like they manage their most successful products: measurable values, long term ownership, iterative delivery, and continuous customer focus. This should be treated like a program and not only as a defensive layer, but a core business capability.
1. Cyber attacks are now business events, not an IT incidents
Material Impact on Organization:
Revenue, stock price, customer trust, supply chain, regulatory compliances are impacted due to major breaches. Few examples:
- The 2024 CrowdStrike incident triggered an estimated $10-15 billion in collective customer losses and market-cap destruction within days.
- MGM Resort Cyber attack 2023 had an impact of $100M in revenue loss and recovery expenses
- MOVEit breach 2023 led to hundreds of organizations facing lawsuits and ransom payments
2. Regulators Risks
Regulators like SEC, FCA, MAS, ECB and EU’s DORA require material cyber incidents to be disclosed within days
3. Insurance and Financial markets treat it as business risk
Cyber insurance underwriters ask for EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization) impact scenario, crisis communication plan, revenue resilience and not just firewall model
| Incident | Year | Estimated EBITDA / Revenue Hit | Duration |
| Maersk (NotPetya) | 2017 | $250–300 million loss | ~2 weeks downtime |
| MGM Resorts (ransomware) | 2023 | ~$100 million (mostly lost gaming & hotel revenue) | 10 days |
| Change Healthcare (ransomware) | 2024 | Parent company UnitedHealth lost ~$1.5–2 billion in 2024 EBITDA | Months |
| CrowdStrike outage (global) | 2024 | Affected companies reported $10–100 million+ each in lost revenue | 1–5 days |
| DP World Australia (ports) | 2023 | ~A$80 million in lost profit | 3–4 days |
4. Banks should treat Cyber Resilience like a Product
To elevate cyber resilience from a necessary cost center to core competitive edge, banks must adopt the mindset and methodology used for their most successful digital supports
Clear vision, a roadmap, feedback, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), accountable ownership makes a digital product successful.
Cyber resilience demands the same rigor and model
- Product Vision: A strong resilience vision like, customer-facing services within X hours from any catastrophic cyber event with uncorrupted and known good data.
- Building a multi-year Product Roadmap: Such products can’t be built in a year. Banks need a multi-year plan that includes:
- Data Protection modernization:
- Immutable storage (also known as Write-Once, Read-Many or WORM) is a policy that prevents data from being altered, encrypted or deleted once written to the storage system for a specified retention period. The core feature that the data gets locked and unchangeable provides a defense system against ransomware attack and data corruption ensuring that the data copy cannot be maliciously tampered with.
- The isolated vault storage or Cyber vault is a highly secure segmented environment to protect the most critical backup copies which is logically or physically “air-gapped” from the main production network accessible via secure dual factor or multi-person authorization.
- Automated Recovery: Developing and testing automated recovery workflow
- AI Driven Detection: Implementing AI/ ML for anomaly detection.
- Regulatory Adherence: Ensuring the compliance is built into recovery framework
- Data Protection modernization:
- Dedicated Product Ownership and Accountability: Resilience may often fail if the ownership is scattered across several functions, hence accountability with Product Owner plays a major role to prioritize and deliver the vision.
- Telemetry, Feedback Loops and KPIs: You cannot improve, what you do not measure.
Few products centric KPIs:
| Resilience KPI | What it measures |
| Data Corruption Exposure | % of critical data assets that are compromised or unrecoverable |
| Time to Recover Critical Processes (RTO) | Actual time taken to restore core business services |
| % of workloads with Immutable Protection | % of high value systems protected by unchangeable, verifiable backups |
| Recovery Exercise Frequency | How often recovery drills are performed and success rate of the attempts |
| Audit & Regulatory Readiness Scores | Score reflecting the preparedness for external security |
What gets measured can be improved.
“The banks that dominate the 2030s will be the ones whose boards ask every quarter:
‘What did we ship this quarter on resilience?’ not just ‘How many attacks did we block?’
5. The future Model: Cyber Resilience as a Capability Program
Leading financial institutions are moving beyond basic compliance and reorganizing their efforts to establish cyber resilience as a mature program. This model integrates architecture, governance, process and cohesive strategy ensuring the bank can recover from vulnerable attacks.
1. Program Governance:
- A dedicated program governance structure to regulate planning and meetings to ensure that program is continually aligned with business strategy and receives the necessary funding and prioritization
- Unified Participation: To ensure that every plan is are technically feasible, meets security requirement and satisfy critical business objective
2. Tiered Protection Architecture
Modern resilience architecture relies on multiple, isolated layer of defense to guarantee at least one available recovery point
Production -> Backup Copy -> Immutable Vault -> Air Gapped/ Isolated Recovery environment
Immutable vault guarantees data integrity. A dedicated clean room environment is used exclusively for recovery testing and actual failover and automated failover and testing validates that data recoverable from vault is uncorrupted and functional in clean room.
- Continuous attack simulation and recovery drills. Claiming resilience without rigorous testing is just an assumption.
- Full Spectrum testing: Drills must simulate not just component failure, but full-scale simultaneous attacks
- Isolated Clean room testing: Simulating a true worst-case scenario, validating the entire failover and restore process works end to end
- Metrics driven improvement: Result from every drill should be measured against KPI to inform the next iteration of the roadmap.
6. Why this shift matters to the Bank
The key benefits of treating cyber resilience as a core program:
- Regulatory confidence and compliance: Auditors and regulatory bodies are rapidly shifting their focus to demanding verifiable resilience.
- Faster recovery = Less financial and reputational loss: Rapid recoverable clean, validated data directly minimizes business interruption costs, financial and reputational losses
- Improved Customer and Market Trust: Tested resilience capability is a competitive advantage that the bank can communicate to customers and stakeholders
- Better Use of Technology Investment: Every tool purchased contributes directly to achieving the overall resilience business. Technology investment is no longer isolated deployments.
Conclusion: Cyber Resilience Must Become a Board-Level Priority
Cyber Resilience must now be treated with the same rigor, discipline and investment strategy as the core digital product. Establishing a clear vision, roadmap, KPIs measuring customer value and committing to multiyear protection plan.
This will not only safeguard the capital data and reputation but will also define a secured, trusted, uninterrupted financial services. Resilience is the ultimate insurance policy for digital bank.
Author Bio:
Archana Choudhary is a global technology leader, transformation strategist, and award-winning mentor with nearly two decades of experience in the IT and banking sectors. Renowned for driving enterprise-scale change, she has successfully led global Agile transformations, implemented many IT project strategies, and established scalable governance models that improved delivery timelines, reduced costs, and strengthened organizational resilience across continents. Archana is a cyber resilience and data protection leader advising global Tier-1 bank on the cyber recovery product strategy
As a champion of innovation, Archana has pioneered Agile frameworks tailored to infrastructure and operations. Her leadership has fostered measurable business outcomes positioning her as a true reformer in the technology landscape.
Beyond her organizational achievements, Archana is deeply committed to mentorship and community leadership. She has mentored professionals worldwide in project management, Agile practices, career growth, and facilitates PMP study groups through PMI chapter. She frequently speaks at global and regional industry conferences, including PMI chapter events and the upcoming PMI Global Summit in PhoenixHer global influence extends further through her judging engagements with many award committee including PMI where she helps recognize excellence and raise standards across the industry.
Her leadership impact has earned her multiple international recognition and awards. These accolades reflect both her measurable achievements and her unwavering commitment to elevating others.
At the core of Archana’s leadership is a belief that technology and people must grow together. She is not only advancing digital transformation but also cultivating future leaders, ensuring her impact is multiplied across organizations, industries, and global communities.
