Cyber Resilience Is a Culture: Lessons on Preparing for the Inevitable

In cybersecurity today, the real question isn’t if your organization will face an attack—it’s when. That unsettling reality set the tone for a recent Aventi Live webinar featuring futurist and cybersecurity expert Heather Vescent. In conversation with Sridhar Ramanathan, Aventi Co-founder and COO, the two explored what it means to be truly prepared for cybersecurity threats in 2025—and why conventional strategies aren’t enough.

What followed was a conversation that challenged assumptions, reframed the role of marketing in security, and offered a pragmatic (yet hopeful) roadmap for companies striving to build more resilient systems—and cultures.

Reframing the Mission: From Protection to Resilience

Heather Vescent has advised everyone from the Department of Homeland Security to global fintech firms. She’s co-authored The Cyber Attack Survival Manual, conducted deep research into the future of digital identity, and built a career helping leaders look beyond buzzwords to uncover what actually works. But her message at the webinar’s outset was simple: “You can’t stop every attack. That’s not the goal. The goal is resilience.”

Too often, she explained, organizations pour resources into trying to block every possible vulnerability, investing heavily in endpoint protection, zero-trust architecture, and threat detection tools—while ignoring the human, operational, and communication factors that determine how effectively a company can recover when something inevitably goes wrong.

Resilience, as Heather described it, is about speed and structure. Can you identify what’s been compromised quickly? Can you isolate the threat? Do you have the mechanisms in place—technical and interpersonal—to coordinate a response?

That emphasis on continuity and adaptability laid the foundation for the rest of the discussion.

Culture: The Missing Layer in Most Cyber Strategies

One of the webinar’s central themes was that many cybersecurity strategies are structurally sound, yet culturally fragile. Heather emphasized that if your people don’t understand their role in maintaining security—or feel disengaged from the issue entirely—your organization will remain vulnerable, no matter how advanced your tools are.

She shared an example from a fintech company that radically transformed its internal training approach. Instead of forcing employees through dry policy documents or mandatory webinars, the security team partnered with HR to create immersive, interactive modules. These simulated real phishing attacks, prompted employees to make live decisions, and delivered feedback in real time.

The impact was immediate and measurable. Not only did click-throughs on real phishing attempts drop, but employees began discussing security in team meetings, sharing tips, and flagging potential risks proactively.

“People don’t respond to fear-based messaging or rigid compliance checklists,” Heather explained. “They want relevance. They want clarity. And they want to feel like partners in the solution, not passive recipients of policy.”

Practice Makes Prepared: The Role of Breach Rehearsals

Another major gap Heather sees repeatedly across organizations is the failure to rehearse. Many companies have breach response plans—they’re required for regulatory reasons, after all—but very few take the time to simulate real-life scenarios, especially across departments.

“When something goes wrong, it’s chaos. And if you haven’t practiced together, no one knows who’s driving,” she said.

She advocates for regular tabletop exercises, ideally once per quarter. These shouldn’t be limited to IT or InfoSec. Legal, communications, HR, product, and yes—marketing—should all be at the table.

This led Sridhar to a crucial point: product marketers are often at the front lines when it comes to communicating during a security incident. From crafting customer messages and website updates to preparing executive talking points and field enablement, marketing has an outsized role in protecting the brand during a breach.

Yet, as Sridhar noted, they’re often the last to be brought into incident response planning. Heather agreed, and recommended developing communications templates—pre-approved by legal and tested in advance—to reduce friction and reaction time when a real incident occurs.

“Don’t wait until the building’s on fire to decide who’s grabbing the extinguisher,” she said. “Marketing needs to be ready—not just with messaging, but with alignment.”

Decentralized Identity and the Next Frontier

Midway through the conversation, Heather pivoted to a forward-looking concept she believes is essential to long-term cyber resilience: self-sovereign identity (SSI).

In contrast to today’s centralized systems—where credentials and identity data are stored and verified by governments, employers, or software providers—SSI allows individuals to own and manage their identity data independently. Using cryptographic proofs and decentralized protocols, a user can choose who to share their information with, when, and under what conditions.

Why does this matter? Because many modern breaches—particularly phishing and impersonation attacks—stem from weaknesses in how identity is managed and validated. Centralized databases become high-value targets. Passwords get reused. Trust is easily spoofed.

SSI dramatically reduces those risks, Heather argued. It also offers more autonomy and privacy to users, which can be especially powerful in industries like healthcare, education, and finance.

While adoption is still in early stages, Heather believes forward-thinking companies should start evaluating SSI frameworks now—not just as a security measure, but as a way to differentiate on trust.

Real Talk: What Attendees Wanted to Know

During the Q&A portion, audience members raised questions that reflected the reality many companies are facing:

• How can small companies or startups improve cybersecurity without massive budgets?
  Heather’s advice: focus on education, awareness, and free tools. “Start with training and a plan. You don’t need six-figure software to teach your team how to identify phishing or to rehearse a breach scenario.”
  
• How do you get non-technical executives to care about cybersecurity?
  “Stop talking about firewalls. Start talking about revenue loss, reputational damage, and customer churn,” Heather said. She encouraged framing security as a business continuity and risk management conversation—not a technical debate.
  
• What’s a good first breach scenario to simulate if we’ve never done it?
  Her pick: ransomware. “It’s dramatic. It’s disruptive. And it’s a good way to surface weaknesses in decision-making and communication chains.”
  

Each answer emphasized the same idea: cyber resilience isn’t something that only large enterprises can pursue. It’s a mindset—and a set of practices—that can be scaled to fit organizations of any size.

The Role of Product Marketing in Cyber Strategy

A subtle but powerful thread throughout the session was the evolving role of product marketing in cybersecurity initiatives. While traditionally viewed as external-facing brand builders, today’s product marketers are also internal connectors—aligning sales, product, and leadership with unified narratives.

In a breach scenario, that ability becomes critical. Messaging must be fast, accurate, and coordinated across channels. Heather urged marketing teams to take the initiative: ask to participate in incident response planning, get briefed on legal guidelines, and maintain a communication toolkit for emergencies.

Sridhar added that proactive marketers should also integrate security into positioning and sales enablement—not as fear-mongering, but as a strategic differentiator. “If your product reduces risk, makes compliance easier, or supports data governance, those are business value messages. They’re not just technical specs—they’re what buyers care about.”

Cybersecurity Is a Shared Responsibility

What made this conversation resonate wasn’t just the depth of insight—it was the way Heather humanized the topic. Cybersecurity, she reminded us, is about people. The people who make mistakes, the people who respond under pressure, and the people who learn from failure.

Technology matters, but culture matters more. And in a time when threats are becoming more sophisticated, rapid, and costly, resilience isn’t a luxury—it’s a necessity.

The companies that will thrive in this new environment are the ones who prepare—not just with policies, but with people. Not just with software, but with shared responsibility.

Watch the Recording

If you missed the live session—or want to revisit the insights—you can watch the full recording here. It’s a must-watch for product marketers, cybersecurity leaders, and anyone involved in safeguarding an organization’s reputation, data, and long-term viability.