Resilience isn’t in a brochure. It’s in the stories boards tell after the breach.
When a company survives a cyber incident intact – systems restored, customers informed, operations back online – that story becomes the real measure of resilience. And over the past few years, Europe has had more of those stories than most boards would like to admit.
The MOVEit data breach, Capita’s public sector disruption, the ripple effect from BA and Heathrow’s service outages – each showed that resilience isn’t about the scale of the logo, but the strength of the partnerships that stand behind it.
When Europe Was Tested
MOVEit and the domino effect
MOVEit was supposed to be a routine file transfer platform. Then came the mass exploitation. Hundreds of organisations across Europe – from airlines to banks to government departments found themselves exposed through a third-party connector.
Capita and the cost of dependence
Capita’s breach in 2023, still echoing into 2025 in regulatory fines and service delays, reminded every UK and EU executive what operational dependence really means. One supplier. One missed update. And suddenly, thousands of customers and public institutions were offline.
Aviation’s wake-up call
Even the aviation sector, with its famously strict safety protocols, wasn’t immune. Disruptions cascading from Heathrow to European partner networks revealed just how fragile “business as usual” can be when supply chain visibility is thin.
ENISA’s Threat Landscape 2024 calls this the new normal of compromise: attacks no longer aim for single points of failure but for the links that hold industries together. Supply-chain exploitation has surged by more than 40% across Europe – not because attackers got smarter, but because too many networks still share credentials, data, and cloud connectors without shared accountability. MOVEit, Capita, and aviation partners all proved the same point: resilience isn’t about isolation, it’s about coordination.
Lessons Boards Can’t Ignore
Resilience isn’t a theory. It’s the difference between payroll running or stalling on Monday morning.
The lessons are blunt:
Detection speed matters
The faster an organisation recognises abnormal behaviour, the smaller the impact radius.
Supply chain exposure is real
Every connected vendor extends the attack surface.
Preparedness wins time
Playbooks only work if they’ve been tested with real people under real pressure.
Boards that learned from these incidents have stopped asking “Could this happen to us?” and started asking “When it does, who will stand with us?”
What Good Providers Delivered
The firms that helped Europe recover didn’t lead with jargon. They led with presence.
They coordinated directly with regulators, managed cross-border disclosures, and restored services without paralysing communication.
Good providers didn’t just patch systems – they stabilised confidence. They knew when to talk, when to act, and when to tell the truth. That balance between containment and transparency is what separates a partner from a vendor.
The best of them left something behind: improved logging, smarter segmentation, and new detection habits that outlived the breach itself.
A Resilience Mindset for 2026
Resilience can’t be bought; it has to be built.
It’s built in the quiet weeks between headlines – in how providers help clients test response drills, tighten supplier oversight, and learn from their near misses.
That’s where ENHALO’s role continues to grow: working alongside boards to strengthen what already exists, not sell another layer of noise.
Our teams see resilience not as a product line but as a culture – one that gets tested when systems fail and reputations are on the line.
The Real Measure of Resilience
The providers that shaped Europe’s cyber resilience this year weren’t the loudest. They were the ones still answering the phone after the first 48 hours.
Resilience is earned in those moments… when the breach is live, the board is awake, and your partner doesn’t disappear into the weekend.
