Most teams don’t fall behind on resilience because they ignore it.
They fall behind because they treat it like a project—with a start date and an end date.
But real resilience doesn’t end at Day 180. That’s where it shifts gears.
Once the first drill is complete and the fallback plans are drafted, the question becomes:
- How do we keep this sharp?
- How do we keep people engaged?
- How do we make resilience part of the way we operate, not something we review once a year?
Here’s how.
Day 181–240: From Events to Cadence
Establish a Quarterly Drill Cadence
Drills lose impact when they’re rare or unstructured.
What to do:
- Schedule your next two tabletop drills now, include ops, finance, and client-facing teams
- Vary the scenario each time (data breach, vendor outage, physical access denial)
- Assign a facilitator and a note taker
- End with an after-action review and update your fallback documentation
Deliverable: Drill calendar published and accepted by leadership
Launch the “Own It” Review
Fallback plans often become stale because ownership shifts quietly.
Every 60 days:
- Confirm fallback plan owners are still in the role
- Review 3–5 bullet points of their plan with them
- Confirm any recent system changes are reflected
Deliverable: “Fallback Ownership Tracker” updated quarterly
Day 241–270: Refresh, Re-Test, Reassign
Refresh the Scorecard
Your R/Y/G resilience tracker needs to evolve as systems, vendors, and teams change.
How to do it:
- Pull system owners into a 30-minute review session
- Re-rate each critical system: Green = tested and active, Yellow = assigned but untested, Red = no plan
- Update it in shared space (dashboard, wiki, or internal site)
Deliverable: Updated Resilience Scorecard visible to stakeholders
Rotate Drill Participation
Test depth, not just surface.
Bring new people into each drill:
- Include newer hires and rotate team leaders
- Simulate leadership absence (e.g. “assume the manager is unavailable”)
- Build confidence by exposing blind spots
Deliverable: Drill participation tracker showing rotation by role
Day 271–300: Review, Report, Refine
Conduct a Post-Quarter Review
At the end of the quarter:
- Gather drill notes, plan updates, and owner feedback
- Identify: What improved? What stalled? What’s still red?
- Turn this into a 1-page executive summary
Deliverable: Q3 Cyber Resilience Review shared with leadership
Build a “Trigger Log”
Track incidents, near misses, or moments when fallback actions should have been used.
Examples:
- SaaS vendor outage required a shift to paper process
- Key internal system had expired certificate
- Vendor communication failure delayed escalation
These help reinforce why the plan exists.
Deliverable: Rolling log of unplanned events + response summary
Final Thought
Resilience is not a one-time sprint.
And it’s not just a checklist you dust off once a year.
It’s a rhythm. A system. A habit that keeps you ready even when priorities shift.
By Day 300, your team should:
- Be running quarterly drills
- Be rotating participation and ownership
- Have visibility into risk and readiness at a glance
- Know what triggers a response and how to act when it does
The businesses that survive aren’t the ones who wrote the best plans.
They’re the ones who practiced them, and made those plans part of how they operate.
Need help testing your plan? Start with a no-cost risk readiness assessment:
https://huntleigh.com/cyber-risk-assessment/
