Why UK boards are misjudging their cyber-readiness

There is a widening disconnect between how ready many boards believe their organisations are and what incident data shows. In the UK, this overconfidence often stems from equating visible investment with genuine preparedness, which leaves CISOs managing risks that leadership assumes have already been addressed. When that attention drifts from loss control and resilience outcomes, the result is a focus on defence that obscures an incomplete picture of overall resilience. 

 

For many UK organisations, cyber-risk has become a standing item on the board agenda; but the conversation is still often driven by perception rather than data. While technical teams manage controls and compliance, decision-makers need to know something simpler: how does cyber-security exposure translate into business impact, and where should limited resources go next?

 

What insurance data reveals

Modern cyber-insurance has evolved into one of the most powerful intelligence tools available to leadership. Resilience’s Mid-year 2025 Cyber Risk Report offers an example of how much insight lies within claims data. Across the UK and Europe, ransom demands tell only part of the story: the average cost of a ransomware incident climbed 17 percent to over US$1.18 million. The implication is clear: even as fewer breaches succeed, those that do are becoming far more damaging.

 

For boards, that information is gold. Insurer data reveals how long recovery actually takes, where dislocation costs compound, and which threat types are accelerating. Resilience’s 2025 analysis found that ransomware now accounts for 91 percent of incurred losses, despite representing fewer than one in ten claim notifications. That insight shifts the conversation from "are we protected?" to "are we prioritising the right risks?" and helps align spending with where the real exposure sits.

 

Why the misalignment persists

One structural reason the confidence disconnect persists is that security spending is often misaligned with actual resilience. According to a recent budget distribution study, UK organisations typically allocate about 40 percent to tools, about 40 percent to headcount and about 15 percent to outsourcing. The strongest business cases tend to be framed around response and reduction. These priorities are important, but they do not necessarily address the wider organisational risk surface or the operational dependencies that shape real-world recovery.

 

This intelligence also introduces something long missing in corporate cyber-security planning: benchmarking. Boards now know how their organisation’s recovery times, incident patterns and overall resilience compare to peers of a similar size or sector. This transforms cyber-risk from an abstract concept into a quantifiable business metric, one that investors and regulators increasingly expect to see reported with the same rigour as financial or ESG data.

 

Defensive budgets often emphasise prevention, tooling and hygiene, but resilience is defined by response and recovery capability, not by an attack that never arrives. The value of insurance insight becomes most apparent in budgeting and strategy cycles. Decisions about controls, suppliers and investment priorities can now be grounded in empirical evidence rather than optimism or fear alone. For almost a quarter of material losses in 2024, third-party-related claims were the trigger, which helps explain why due diligence processes often deserve more investment than another layer of defensive tooling.

 

Why CISOs need earlier involvement

CISOs are frequently brought into strategic or budget planning too late to challenge assumptions about readiness. By the time they are consulted, spending decisions may already have been framed by outdated or overly optimistic views of resilience. This results in investments that look robust on paper but do not translate into meaningful improvements in response or recovery capability.

 

Insurance intelligence also bridges a crucial communication gap between CISOs and the rest of the board. Because it translates technical threats into financial terms—cost per hour of downtime, average breach remediation expense or sector-wide loss ratios—it allows cyber-security discussions to take place in the language of balance sheets and risk appetite. This shared vocabulary enables executives, risk committees and finance leaders to make joint decisions about resilience rather than deferring entirely to security.

 

Perhaps most importantly, insurers occupy a vantage point no single organisation can match. By aggregating data across thousands of incidents, they can identify systemic vulnerabilities, shifting attack behaviours and emerging threats at scale. When that intelligence feeds back into business planning, it allows leaders to anticipate rather than react, to recalibrate insurance coverage intelligently and to measure performance against outcomes observed across the wider market.

 

Boards now need to integrate resilience planning from the outset, not after budgets are set. That means considering prevention alongside response and recovery, and pulling operational, financial, legal, and communications into technical functions for regular exercises that test readiness under real conditions. Measuring recovery speed, identifying bottlenecks and validating assumptions should become routine elements of governance.

 

In an environment where attacks are constant and consequences immediate, the organisations that thrive will be those that use every available source of insight. Cyber-insurance, when seen not as a policy but as a data platform, offers exactly that: a market tested lens on where risk is rising, what resilience really costs and how to turn evidence into action. 

 

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Si West is Director of Customer Engagement at Resilience

 

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com and sankai