NCSC Annual Review 2025 – What Resilience Looks Like Now

The National Cyber Security Centre’s Annual Review 2025 arrives at a moment when the language of cyber resilience has become inseparable from the language of business itself. Across the public sector and its supply chains, the review paints a picture of a nation more dependent than ever on digital systems — and more exposed than ever to the consequences of their failure.

The document confirms a sharp rise in what it calls “nationally significant” incidents, with state-aligned actors and criminal groups exploiting supply-chain dependencies and operational technology environments at growing scale. But beyond the numbers, the message is sharper than in previous years. The NCSC isn’t focused on prevention alone. It’s talking about endurance — about the ability to operate through disruption with confidence in one’s systems, processes and people. That evolution matters, particularly for organisations that serve government, defence and other regulated domains, where assurance has always been the currency of trust.

Resilience begins, as the review makes clear, with governance. Cyber security can no longer sit as a discrete technical concern at the edge of the business. It has to be threaded through the same frameworks that shape risk, compliance and service continuity. For departments, agencies and suppliers, assurance must extend beyond compliance checklists. It’s no longer enough to claim readiness; it has to be evidenced. When compromise happens — not if — critical systems must continue to function, data must remain protected, and decision-makers must know exactly what to trust.

That shift is already visible. Defence primes now expect partners to demonstrate not only alignment with baseline standards such as Cyber Essentials Plus, but tested resilience across networks, people and processes. The review reinforces that direction of travel — one where trust is proven, not presumed. True assurance demands design discipline: secure-by-design architectures, segregated environments, accredited platforms, and continual validation against recognised frameworks such as CSMv4, the Defence Cyber Certification model and the NCSC’s own guidance for resilient digital services.

The threat environment running through this year’s review feels familiar, yet more layered. Ransomware remains pervasive, but its methods have matured. Attacks increasingly exploit interconnections — shared service providers, managed workspaces, integrated supply chains — creating ripple effects that reach far beyond the original breach. Most impactful incidents during the year, the NCSC notes, involved a supply-chain component. That observation lands squarely in the B2B and public-sector space, where resilience depends as much on visibility and accountability across an extended digital estate as it does on internal defences. Knowing who has access, what is connected and how data flows between environments has become fundamental to assurance itself.

Structured models such as the Defence Cyber Certification are beginning to offer a proportionate way to measure maturity and align expectations across this chain, but the point is broader. No organisation can achieve resilience in isolation. The continuity of government and defence operations rests on the reliability of every contributor, from large integrators to the smallest consultancy. Resilience, in that sense, is a collective act.

Perhaps the most telling part of the review lies not in its statistics but in its tone. It quietly challenges a long-standing culture of compliance. Compliance, by definition, is static — a point-in-time declaration. Resilience is something else entirely. It’s dynamic, adaptive, and conscious of the organisation’s appetite for risk. The NCSC’s emphasis on leadership and preparedness echoes what we see across our own programmes: the most resilient organisations aren’t necessarily those with the most technology, but those with clarity of governance, maturity of process and a culture that treats cyber risk as a business reality rather than a technical one.

Building that kind of confidence means practising assurance as a continuous loop — design, validation, rehearsal, refinement. It means exercising response plans, testing recovery mechanisms and ensuring that people, not just systems, know how to act when disruption comes. The organisations that do this well tend to communicate with quiet confidence. They don’t promise invulnerability; they demonstrate readiness.

The NCSC’s review closes with an implicit challenge. The UK’s resilience will depend less on the number of attacks prevented and more on the number endured with minimal disruption. For those working in high-assurance environments, that isn’t a new idea — but it’s becoming a national one.

At Logiq, this message aligns closely with the work we carry out every day: helping clients design, deliver and assure secure systems that can withstand the pace of modern threats. Whether through secure-by-design architectures, managed environments such as DISX, or independent assurance aligned to NCSC principles, our focus remains on enabling organisations to operate with confidence when compromise occurs.

Resilience, ultimately, isn’t a milestone. It’s a discipline. The NCSC’s Annual Review 2025 leaves little doubt: the organisations that treat it as such will be the ones trusted to keep the country running when others falter.