The UK’s decision to stand up a £1 billion Cyber and Electromagnetic Command (CyberEM) marks a significant milestone in how the country frames cyber defence. Headquartered at MoD Corsham, the new command centre will bring together the UK’s offensive and defensive cyber operations under a permanent structure.
It’s a strategic move, but it’s also a necessary one. The pace, volume, and coordination of cyber threats have evolved well beyond what traditional military and government silos can respond to. Persistent digital operations now require persistent infrastructure. That’s exactly what this command aims to provide.
But while the headlines are focused on the military implications, the consequences reach far wider — particularly into the private sector. Organisations operating in healthcare, finance, transport, energy, communications, and other essential services should not be watching this development from the sidelines. Many are already part of the digital supply chain that attackers will exploit long before they ever reach a government endpoint.
CyberEM Command is being built to respond to this kind of interconnected threat landscape. The question is whether the private sector will evolve its posture at the same time, or continue to wait for regulatory nudges that arrive too late.
The Cyber Battlefield Is Already Commercial
Most real-world attacks don’t start with a direct hit on a government target. They begin with credential theft from a contractor. A misconfigured S3 bucket. An insecure third-party integration. The kind of weaknesses that are common in fast-moving, commercially driven environments with long supply chains and multiple service providers.
We’ve already seen this play out in the UK. NHS partner systems have been taken offline. Transport systems have been delayed by compromised logistics platforms. In some cases, attackers didn’t even need to breach government systems — they just had to wait for the data to come through the hands of someone less prepared.
This is why the line between “public” and “private” infrastructure has become irrelevant in practical terms. A breach in a payroll platform, or an endpoint on a contractor’s laptop, can trigger disruption that reaches right into critical services.
Organisations that still view national cyber defence as someone else’s responsibility are ignoring the reality of how threat actors actually operate. You don’t have to be the target to be the access point.
Most Businesses Haven’t Tested The Controls They Rely On
There’s no shortage of frameworks, policies, or well-intended guidance on how to secure digital environments. The problem is how often those controls exist in theory only.
In many companies, the last time the incident response plan was reviewed was after a compliance audit — not after a realistic simulation. Breach detection tools are in place, but they’re tuned for known signatures, not behavioural drift. Vendor access is tracked in spreadsheets, not systems. And executive teams often remain one layer removed from incident planning, until the moment a real event forces them into the centre of it.
Too many organisations still conflate presence with preparedness. Having the right tools in your stack is not the same as being ready to use them under real pressure. Resilience isn’t a matter of budget. It’s a matter of coordination — and that starts with visibility and honest evaluation of the systems you think you can count on.
How Businesses Should Be Responding Now
You don’t need to overhaul your architecture tomorrow, but you do need to recalibrate how your organisation thinks about risk.
Start by understanding where you fit into the national picture. If your platform, product, or infrastructure supports any sector considered essential — directly or indirectly — you need to treat yourself as a node on the national grid. That means stress-testing your systems, identifying dependencies you’ve been ignoring, and making sure your incident response capacity includes not just IT, but legal, communications, and executive leadership.
Review how your business would respond if a breach occurred upstream — and you had to provide assurance within hours, not days. Revisit vendor access models. Monitor credential behaviour patterns, not just endpoints. Design your detection strategy to spot subtle anomalies, not just obvious payloads.
Crucially, involve leadership early and often. You don’t want to introduce your CEO to the breach plan on the day it’s activated.
Cyberem Command Won’t Cover For Local Weaknesses
This new command centre represents a serious investment in UK national security, and the people building it should be applauded. But it doesn’t give anyone else permission to relax.
Attackers will still choose the easiest path in. If your organisation is connected to the broader digital infrastructure — and it almost certainly is — you remain part of the exposure surface. Your controls, your people, and your visibility still matter.
CyberEM Command might shape national response policy. But how a breach unfolds — and how much damage it causes — will still come down to the systems in place at the time of the attack — your systems.
If your breach detection relies on noise, you’ll miss quiet threats. If your controls aren’t unified, you’ll lose clarity when it matters most. And if you haven’t rehearsed your response, your first move will likely be the wrong one.
Resilience Isn’t A Budget Line — It’s A Posture
The UK has made a strong move toward formalising its cyber defence. But for that move to succeed in practice, the private sector needs to treat security as an operating condition, not a policy checkbox.
Every organisation that touches critical services — whether directly or through the supply chain — has a role to play in national cyber resilience. Not because it’s been legislated yet, but because the attack surface is already shared.
This is a moment for clarity, not ceremony.
Know what you’re responsible for.
Understand where your blind spots are.
And fix what needs fixing — before someone else finds it for you.
