• 28 August, 2025
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Cybersecurity Resilience: Why 72% of Singapore Businesses Struggle with Breaches

In Singapore’s increasingly digital economy, the promise of innovation often comes with an unwelcome companion: cyber risk. As businesses across Southeast Asia double down on digital and AI transformation, many are quietly overlooking the weakest link in their cybersecurity posture: resilience.

Cybersecurity resilience, the ability to recover swiftly and effectively from a cyberattack, has become a crucial factor in ensuring business continuity. According to a recent study by Tech Research Asia, most Singapore-based organisations express confidence in their ability to recover from a cyberattack. Yet, when tested, that confidence often gives way to chaos, showing that cybersecurity resilience is not just a plan on paper but a capability in practice.

The illusion of cybersecurity resilience and readiness

Across eight markets, including Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia, the survey polled 1,218 organisations, with 154 of them based in Singapore.

An overwhelming majority of these businesses claimed to have confidence in their cyber defence capabilities. Nine in ten firms in Singapore believed they could withstand a breach, suggesting that investment in security tools, frameworks, and plans is not in short supply. However, this confidence is proving to be dangerously misplaced.

When it comes to true cybersecurity resilience, only a third of the respondents could respond effectively when a breach occurred. Alarmingly, 12% admitted they had no plan at all. In these cases, preparedness was theoretical at best. The disconnect between perceived readiness and actual cybersecurity resilience has left many organisations scrambling, compounding both the technical and reputational damage of breaches.

Why breach recovery plans often fail

The underlying issue is not a lack of tools or policies but a failure to continuously test and adapt them. While 85% of organisations reported having an incident response plan (IRP), just 30% regularly tested all mission-critical workloads. That leaves significant operational blind spots.

Confidence, it turns out, is often built on unchecked assumptions. As cyber threats become more sophisticated and fast-moving, old response frameworks struggle to keep up, leading to significant failures in cybersecurity resilience. Organisations with a low level of cybersecurity resilience struggle to bounce back effectively, making their recovery efforts even more difficult.

Adding to the challenge is the complexity of the IT environment itself. With 63% of organisations in Asia now operating in hybrid or multi-cloud infrastructures, full visibility into data relationships and system dependencies has become essential. Yet 38% of surveyed organisations admitted they lacked this visibility, severely undermining their ability to coordinate and execute recovery efforts. The result is a cybersecurity resilience gap that many businesses fail to address until it is too late.

The data recovery dilemma

Organisations are also plagued by unrealistic recovery expectations. The study shows that 72% of business leaders believe they can recover fully within five days of a breach, with nearly a quarter expecting full recovery within just one day. This optimism is not only unfounded but potentially dangerous. In reality, IT leaders report it takes three to four weeks to restore even a minimal level of business operation after a breach, exposing the critical importance of cybersecurity resilience.

These inflated expectations create a dangerous disconnect between leadership and frontline technical teams. When recovery efforts fall short of boardroom promises, the fallout includes lost customer trust, disrupted operations, and reputational damage that can persist long after systems are restored. Organisations with low recovery maturity were more than twice as likely to fail to recover all data and 34% more likely to be locked out of their systems entirely.

This highlights the crucial role of cybersecurity resilience in mitigating long-term consequences of data breaches.

Culture, complexity, and complacency

One reason recovery efforts fall short is that cybersecurity is still viewed primarily as a technical issue, rather than an enterprise-wide responsibility. As Michel Borst of Commvault noted, boards and executive teams are placing major bets on digital transformation, yet often fail to invest proportionately in cyber recovery. Confidence without capability, he warned, can lead to business failure.

Achieving true cybersecurity resilience requires alignment across departments, and the responsibility should not be siloed in IT. For businesses to recover quickly and effectively, cybersecurity resilience must be integrated into every facet of the organisation’s operations. Incident response plans that are siloed within IT departments, untested across departments, or poorly understood by leadership teams are bound to collapse under real-world pressure. Cyber resilience requires not just technical controls but also governance, cross-functional playbooks, and regular drills. Without these, the best intentions amount to little more than security theatre.

The report’s findings also call attention to a regional problem of overconfidence. In a landscape where cyber threats evolve daily, many organisations are still operating with outdated recovery playbooks. This is particularly concerning given the rapid growth in data volumes and increasing adoption of hybrid cloud solutions across Asia. The greater the complexity, the higher the stakes. To pretend otherwise is to invite failure, especially when cybersecurity resilience is not adequately addressed.

The need for continuous testing and minimum viable readiness

Resilience is not static. It must be earned through repeated testing, realistic simulations, and ruthless auditing of one’s blind spots.

As Gareth Russell, Field CTO for APAC at Commvault, aptly put it, even the most meticulously crafted plans can fall apart once a breach occurs. In today’s landscape, maintaining continuous operations is non-negotiable. Organisations need to shift from a “build once, trust forever” mindset to a posture of continuous resilience. Minimum viable readiness should be the baseline, not the goal. This includes regular tabletop exercises, red-teaming engagements, and end-to-end breach simulations that stress-test real-world response across both technical and non-technical teams. The objective should be to ensure cybersecurity resilience is ingrained as a routine practice that evolves with new threats and challenges.

Privacy Ninja: Helping businesses stay ready, not just confident

The gap between readiness and resilience is not insurmountable, but it does require focused expertise. This is where Privacy Ninja can provide critical support. As Singaporean businesses navigate increasingly complex digital environments, Privacy Ninja offers a full suite of cybersecurity services designed to expose hidden vulnerabilities and build operational resilience.

Our Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing (VAPT) services allow organisations to simulate real-world attacks in order to identify weak spots in their infrastructure, policies, and staff training. Our Data Breach Management services ensure rapid containment and investigation of incidents, while our DPO-as-a-Service helps companies comply with the PDPA and ensure data governance is not just a paper exercise.

We understand that the cost of overconfidence is high. Our approach emphasises continuous testing, practical training, and realistic simulations. In a world where recovery defines survival, Privacy Ninja helps clients do more than feel ready. We help them be ready. Whether you are a small enterprise or a large corporation, cybersecurity resilience is the key to not just surviving a breach but thriving in the face of increasing cyber threats. With Privacy Ninja by your side, organisations can build a sustainable, resilient cybersecurity framework that is adaptive, effective, and future-proof.