Recently, I watched a popular TV show about the daily lives of doctors and nurses in a fictional emergency room (ER) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This season, the story introduced a main antagonist that I found relatable. The ER department is hit by a major ransom-driven cyberattack that shut down the entire hospital and triggered every conceivable consequence.
Due to compromised network security, the staff couldn’t rely on modern equipment to diagnose their patients. This resulted in several major “pit(t)falls” (pun intended), leaving customers dissatisfied and, even more concerning, compromising some patients’ medical treatment. This season underscored the impact on both staff and patients when dealing with a ransom-based data targeting attack. While healthcare attacks illustrate the human impact, cyber events can affect every industry with devastating results.
When fiction mirrors reality
Modern cyberattacks are no longer isolated. They target entire systems within organizations, often preying on gaps within infrastructure. According to IDC research, only 31% of organizations were able to fully recover from a cyberattack without losing data, paying the ransom, or both.1
Enterprises may focus on certain aspects of their application stacks, such as the network, while outsourcing data backups to a third-party vendor. These types of gaps are precisely what malicious actors target and take advantage of, leading to operational downtime, revenue loss and lasting reputational damage.
Leaders are quickly realizing the real question isn’t if a breach can be prevented, but how fast an organization can restore systems, recover data and keep essential systems moving. This is why having a sound cyber resilience strategy is so important.
What is cyber resilience?
Cyber resilience is an organization’s ability to prepare for, withstand and recover from cyber incidents while keeping critical operations running. It combines prevention and protection with practical backup, recovery and response plans—so a successful attack doesn’t become a prolonged business outage.
Traditional cybersecurity focuses on reducing risk and blocking threats. Cyber resilience assumes threats will get through and prioritizes the business outcomes that matter most: limiting blast radius, restoring trusted data and returning to business-as-usual (BAU) quickly. That means designing resilience end-to-end across the network, storage and data protection layers to close the handoff gaps attackers often exploit.
As cyberattacks expand in frequency and complexity, many organizations are being forced to rethink the protection of their most critical assets. Cyber resiliency represents the shift from traditional cybersecurity to proactive preparedness; building security measures before threats strike rather than reacting after damage occurs.
By designing infrastructure to actively detect anomalies across storage or network environments, organizations can minimize risk from the foundation upwards while strengthening the security posture of their systems. This approach ensures that when chaos occurs, businesses remain well positioned to react rapidly and recover effectively to BAU.
Building cyber resilience before the breach
Watching this TV drama unfold, I couldn’t help thinking that the season could have ended by episode six if only the fictional Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center had known about Lumen® Cyber Resiliency. With Lumen, organizations can rapidly and efficiently recover to known cleanroom environments during the chaos of a cyber event. By minimizing impact, preserving business operations and keeping critical data accessible, Lumen sets organizations up with comprehensive protection, detection and response.
Powered by the Lumen Network, customers benefit from rapid recovery and seamless migration of data with less than 5ms of latency across 97% of the United States, strengthening cyber resilience at scale in partnership with industry leaders. Lumen Cyber Resiliency brings together NetApp’s OnTAP solutions, enabling threat-aware storage alongside Commvault Cloud cleanrooms, providing isolated environments for recovery.
Using a unified solution that brings together trusted leaders in connectivity, storage and data backup empowers organizations to create a foundational infrastructure that is secured at every level.
Why cyber resilience is a business imperative now
Cyber resiliency is going from a nice-to-have solution to a business imperative in 2026 and beyond. Cyber incidents continue to have drastic impact on organizations in different ways. Some businesses may suffer from a fallout in customer trust, while others can encounter service disruptions and product downtimes. While consequences can vary by attack type, industry vertical or size, the need for operational continuity and safeguarding of critical data remains universal.
On TV, the episode ends when the lights come back on. In business, the story isn’t over until you can restore clean data and resume operations.
To learn more about how Lumen is at the forefront of securing critical infrastructure and delivering enterprise-scale cyber resiliency, explore this spotlight paper by IDC. You’ll learn why it’s essential to build an organization-wide cyber resilience program and how a managed service provider can help.
If you’re wondering how well your infrastructure would be able to stand up to modern threats, request a complimentary threat assessment. Lumen experts will identify gaps and opportunities to bolster your defenses for stronger security and faster recovery.
¹IDC, Getting to cyber resilience through managed services, December 2025.
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