Introduction
Australian organisations are not taking resilience seriously enough. According to BDO’s Tectonic States report, only 62 per cent of Australian business leaders ranked resilience as their top organisational priority, this is compared to 78 per cent of leaders in other countries, including the UK and Spain. This signals an opportunity for Australian organisations to build resilience, starting with maintaining speed at scale. In 2026, it’s not only downtime that hurts organisations, but any incident that impacts speed or service delivery can be disastrous.
Businesses are facing multi-pronged challenges that make it easier to stay reactive, rather than adopt a preventative stance to security. From legacy tech debt to lagging Board accountability, there is a system of operating that is holding businesses back from building resilience. This simply is no longer sustainable.
It used to be all about uptime. How can we keep the lights on? Then it became about response time. How quickly can we get the lights back on when incidents are inevitable? Now, it needs to be about real-time certainty, confidence, and knowing your environment at any moment, not just after an incident. Cyber resilience is mission-critical, not a nice-to-have. Today, downtime is completely unacceptable, and the new business challenge is pace.
Getting the Basics Right
Creating organisational resilience can’t be achieved with the newest, shiniest technologies alone. No matter how many tools they buy, organisations can’t move at the scale and speed required to compete if they haven’t got basic cyber hygiene right. This means multi-factor authentication, patching systems and backing up critical data, at the very least. Organisations that struggle with these aren’t ready for modernisation projects, particularly when it comes to adopting AI or scaling securely.
Failing to get the basics right is leaving organisations vulnerable to risk, open to attacks, and more likely to experience breaches due to completely avoidable issues. It also leaves them without a path towards modernisation. Organisations need to see resilience as an opportunity. You can’t think about speed if you are struggling to keep the lights on and lack certainty over your security posture.
Complexity Slows Down Modernisation
Complexity is the enemy of resilience. It blocks transformations and makes it difficult for organisations to modernise and therefore hinders security goals. Tool sprawl and the complexities it adds, has become an operational tax. Adding more tools can easily create a cycle where more systems are communicating with more systems, whilst doing nothing to reduce risk. This is where point solutions tend to come unstuck in today’s technology environments.
Modernisation fails not because organisations lack ambition, but because complexity slows every decision. Security teams can’t enable speed if they’re drowning in tools, alerts and blind spots.
Instead, organisations need to take the opportunity to modernise by adopting a unified architecture as a way to simplify operations and decision-making. This way, platforms work together in an automated and connected way, creating real-time insights that are effective and actionable by providing clarity and confidence to security teams. The quicker you can get to a single pane of glass view for transparency and visibility of the environment, the more secure you are.
Organisations juggle an average of 83 different security solutions from 29 vendors, according to an IBM study in partnership with Palo Alto Networks. This leaves security teams with alert fatigue and increases the risk of missing real threats. A modernised, unified approach would free up resources, improve collaboration, and support better work-life balance and satisfaction.
Building Resilience With Automation
It’s now abundantly clear that keeping up with threats in 2026 cannot be done by relying on humans alone. If we move towards predictability and prevention, automation has to be the backbone of modern organisational operations. This means staying ahead of threats with certainty and confidence, rather than chasing our tails fixing them.
Security team success should no longer be measured by how fast tickets are resolved, but by how few are submitted in the first place. With automation, threats and risks can be identified, verified, and isolated within minutes, regardless of the time of day or night. Without it, it could take days and entire teams across geographies, all while the threat is moving through the organisation.
Real-time visibility across every endpoint enables organisations to identify and remediate vulnerabilities before they become problems and ensures there is no impact on latency, response times or throughput. This not only keeps the lights on but also allows an organisation to move beyond simply staying afloat. Instead, this approach creates confidence, speed, and prevention, and leverages automation to reduce the overall risk and cost involved in keeping an organisation safe. An outcome all business leaders would be more than happy to see.
When it comes to resilience, the goal is now to anticipate risk, automate prevention, and create conditions to ensure downtime never happens. This means getting the basics right, implementing a modern, unified architecture that removes complexity and fills the gaps, and adopting automation that delivers real outcomes to provide certainty the organisation is safe while you sleep.
Organisations no longer have the wiggle room to wait for threats to find them. The organisations that win won’t be the ones that respond fastest after an incident, but those that design resilience into how they operate—so that confidence, predictability and readiness for what comes next reinforce each other rather than compete.
