CISA is now telling critical infrastructure organizations to prepare for cyber outages, not just cyberattacks. The assumption is clear: in a geopolitical crisis, disruption is inevitable, and systems may need to run offline, isolated, or even manually to survive.
One school of thought says, “If we invest enough in Zero Trust, monitoring, and prevention, outages shouldn’t happen.”
CISA’s position suggests otherwise: Plan for isolation. Practice recovery. Assume loss of connectivity. Focus on sustaining essential operations, not perfect uptime.
This raises some uncomfortable questions for leaders:
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Are we over‑optimizing for defense and under‑planning for failure?
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Do boards and executives accept downtime as a strategic reality yet?
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If your cloud, MSP, or telecom link disappears tomorrow, can you still operate?
My take: Resilience is now a national security requirement, not an operational luxury.
Organizations that can isolate fast, recover faster, and operate through disruption will define the next era of cyber leadership.
Do you believe outage‑ready planning is a sign of maturity, or an admission that prevention has failed?
Comment below. Let’s debate.
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Great post, @farrukhshah
The real question for boards in 2026 is: Have you actually tested the ‘Big Red Button’? Most companies have a ‘plan’ to isolate, but they’ve never actually cut the cord to see what breaks. Is it ‘Maturity’ if you have the plan, or only if you’ve actually lived through the simulated outage?
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Resilience isn’t replacing prevention; it’s redefining success. Breaches are inevitable; what matters now is the speed of detection, containment, and recovery.
The risk is treating resilience as an excuse to weaken prevention. Mature security programs invest in both.
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In my opinion, outage-ready planning is the ultimate sign of maturity. It isn’t an admission that prevention has failed; it’s an admission that perfection is an impossible (and dangerous) metric.
Maturity is realizing that “Uptime” is a vanity metric, but “Mission Continuity” is a survival metric.
If a general tells their troops, “Carry a backup radio and a paper map in case the GPS goes down,” no one calls that a failure of GPS technology—they call it good leadership. CISA is simply telling the private sector to start carrying paper maps.
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The “paper map” analogy is perfect. Shifting the focus from “uptime” as a vanity metric to “mission continuity” as a survival metric is exactly what maturity looks like. It’s not about admitting prevention failed; it’s about accepting that perfection is impossible and leading with realistic backup plans.
