Resilience debt: The silent risk undermining cyber recovery

By Colm Keegan, Senior Consultant, Dell Technologies

Organisations have spent the last decade strengthening prevention capabilities — deploying advanced firewalls, endpoint protections, identity controls, and now AI-powered threat detection. But even as security stacks grow more sophisticated, a subtle yet dangerous gap continues to widen beneath the surface.

It’s a gap between what organisations believe they can recover from and what they can actually recover from.

That gap has a cost. And like all unaddressed liabilities, it compounds over time.

It’s what we call Resilience Debt — the accumulation of operational risk created when recovery readiness does not keep pace with the growing complexity and sophistication of cyber threats.

And based on our newly expanded Dell Global Cyber Resilience Insights research, resilience debt is not only real — it’s widespread, and it’s accelerating.

The moment you feel ready is the moment resilience debt begins to grow ...