Interim Chief Information Officer — Cyber Resilience

Establish what must keep working

Identify critical services and map their technology, data, identity and supplier dependencies. Challenge assumed recovery times against available evidence. Review backup arrangements through restoration tests that include access, integration and reconciliation, rather than treating successful backup jobs as proof of recoverability.

Executive responsibilities

Prioritise remediation according to service consequence and feasibility. Strengthen access management, incident coordination and change controls with named owners. Develop a practical response structure with leadership, communications and service teams, and run exercises that expose decision gaps. Ensure outsourced responsibilities are understood and testable.

Recovery exercises should include loss of ordinary communication, unavailable key staff and a supplier whose response is slower than expected. The CIO should ensure that essential decisions can still be made and that recovery priorities reflect service needs. Where restoration depends on a backup, test the complete path from access to usable data and functioning applications. Record what failed, what was learned and what changed, with significant gaps kept visible until the relevant service owner accepts the evidence of improvement.

Candidate qualifications

Candidates should have led IT operations or cyber-resilience programmes in public-interest or similarly critical organisations. They need practical incident and recovery experience, not only policy or assurance credentials. The ability to make proportionate investment choices under resource constraints is essential.

Evidence of completion

The engagement should leave tested recovery procedures, an owned remediation backlog and clear decision rights during disruption. Candidates should explain how they have handled a recovery test that failed despite apparently healthy control indicators. Current roles, access to sensitive information and supplier relationships require conflict screening, with sufficient availability for hands-on leadership.