Protecting the world’s most mission-critical infrastructure—from manufacturing to healthcare to data centers—relies on CIOs’ ability to prioritize operational security as a business continuity imperative.
Downtime and tampering with operational environments have material, even devastating, impacts on business continuity, the recent cyberattack against refrigeration systems at several large supermarket chains in France being a glaring example of that. The refrigeration system attacks caused significant food waste, a disruption in availability to customers, and the level of financial loss is still being measured. Unfortunately, this costly disruption in operations is not a unique experience: according to Claroty’s 2026 global survey on operational resilience, more than half (51%) of CIOs say they have experienced operational downtime as a result of a cyber incident related to their organization’s cyber-physical systems (CPS).
We’ve experienced additional highly impactful attacks like this in just the past few years, such as the Stryker healthcare supply chain attacks and the Jaguar Land Rover cyberattack. With 27% of CIOs saying downtime has lasted between 3-7 days from their organization’s most significant CPS-related cyber incident, that time could mean millions in financial losses, safety hazards, and interruption of services.
These potentially devastating impacts are the result of the accelerating complexity and scale of threats to operational environments: the convergence of IT and OT, rapid AI adoption, and sprawling third-party exposure. Addressing it requires CIOs to lead a unified, outcome-focused, cross-functional action that tangibly reduces business risk.
Integrate resilience into business continuity and recovery
Gaps in today’s approach to securing operational environments leave organizations ill-equipped to address risk in a way that builds resilience and preserves business continuity. CIOs face a balancing act of proving security outcomes that achieve executive mandates amidst organizational and digital transformation.
While CIOs have been leading their organizations to integrate IT and CPS security governance and risk management—64% reported being mostly or fully integrated—they have yet to take the critical next step of unifying those processes with business continuity under the assumption of an inevitable compromise. Most CIOs (54%) said they were only somewhat confident that their organization’s CPS are adequately accounted for in business continuity and disaster recovery plans.
This highlights the need to modernize business continuity plans for operations. CIOs can establish unified governance across IT and OT by investing in real-time visibility and risk management, and adopting a structured, scenario-driven playbook that includes regular cyber-attack drills and recovery workflows tailored to operational environments. These actions ensure that critical operations can withstand, respond to, and rapidly recover from cyber disruptions, safeguarding business outcomes.
Implement a practical framework for operational resilience
To harness the power of operational resilience, CIOs must start by reorienting programmatic protection toward measurable operational resilience. While overall, those working in CPS-related organizations say that CIOs hold primary accountability for operational protection (39% reported this), budget control and oversight remain fragmented across IT, security, and operations. Establish a unified IT and operational governance model across functions to reduce fragmentation and align operational uptime with enterprise security priorities.
CIOs must also transition business continuity and disaster recovery strategies beyond conventional IT failovers toward comprehensive operational recovery. Mandating routine simulation exercises to evaluate offline system recovery, manual overrides, and segmented safety mechanisms remains crucial for protecting revenue and avoiding physical safety risks.
Resilience requires more than just planning; it also requires a mature, measurable, and cross-functional approach. CIOs are at the helm of modernizing and transforming how their organizations safeguard business continuity through proactive operational resilience programs that withstand and rapidly recover from today’s threats to cyber-physical environments.
Explore Claroty’s latest global research to learn more about how organizations are treating operational resilience as a business imperative to safeguard the world’s most mission-critical infrastructure.
