A Risk and Resilience Assessment is a structured review of an organization’s systems, assets, and operating procedures to find weaknesses, rank likely threats, and determine which safeguards will reduce the most risk. In cyber security, it looks beyond software flaws to include identity controls, remote access, network segmentation, backup capacity, monitoring, and recovery planning.
This matters because attackers often exploit the gaps between technology and operations: weak credentials, exposed remote administration, poor asset inventory, or limited incident response planning. For critical infrastructure, such as water utilities and other OT-heavy environments, the assessment helps defenders understand where a disruption would cause the most damage and what controls would best limit it. It is also a planning tool for resilience, because it supports decisions about hardening, detection, response drills, and restoration after an outage or intrusion.