Minimum Viable Company: A Practical Blueprint for Modern Cyber Resilience

In today’s digital economy, resilience is no longer just a technical requirement – it is a strategic imperative. As recent headlines show, cyberattacks are becoming more frequent, more sophisticated, and more damaging, and organisations need to think beyond conventional recovery models. According to recent research, nearly 4,000 cyberattacks occur globally every day, with ransomware striking a business every 14 seconds. In this context, being able to recover after the damage is not enough. The focus must shift to sustaining critical operations during a crisis.

This is where the concept of the Minimum Viable Company (MVC) becomes indispensable. Originating from consulting frameworks, MVC is rapidly gaining relevance in cybersecurity and operational resilience circles. According to KPMG, the MVC is defined as “the smallest possible version of an organisation that can still function and serve customers should an incident bring down part(s) of the operations and systems”. It’s a pragmatic, business-first lens through which to view continuity – not as a return to normality, but as the ability to function effectively while under the immense pressure of a cyberattack.

The strategic value of the MVC approach lies in prioritisation. Rather than attempting to recover everything at once following an attack, the goal is to restore only what is most critical to maintain core operations. These essential components typically include secure access to identity management systems, internal and external communications tools, and the most crucial operational or customer-facing applications. Ensuring that these services are available – even in a degraded state – buys organisations the time they need to execute a broader recovery.

This shift in mindset from recovery to resilience demands more than just technical preparedness. It requires organisational clarity. Roles and responsibilities must be clearly defined well in advance of an incident. Key personnel should be trained not only in response protocols but in decision-making under pressure. A business operating in MVC mode must be agile, coordinated, and decisive, and this level of resilience depends as much on people and process as it does on technology.

A resilient organisation is one that anticipates failure – not as an admission of defeat, but as a design principle. Just as engineers build aircraft with redundancy and fail-safes, cyber-resilient businesses must architect their systems to continue functioning in the face of disruption. This includes embedding cyber resilience into the culture through regular scenario planning, cyber response simulations, and ongoing awareness training across all levels of the organisation.

From a technology standpoint, implementing an MVC framework involves moving beyond legacy backup systems. Traditional backup strategies are no longer sufficient to address modern threats like ransomware, which often targets both live systems and backup environments. Businesses must now invest in advanced protection mechanisms such as immutable, air-gapped backups that cannot be altered or deleted by malware or bad actors. These copies serve as clean, trusted recovery points in worst-case scenarios.

Importantly, organisations must regularly test and validate these recovery systems. An untested backup is merely a theoretical safety net. Continuous validation, automated restoration testing, and failover drills ensure that the systems designed to support MVC operation will work effectively when they are most needed. Increasingly, artificial intelligence and machine learning are being deployed to enhance these processes, helping to detect anomalies, identify threats in real time, and optimise recovery decisions based on dynamic conditions.

While no business aspires to operate in MVC mode, it is far preferable to the alternative: a complete operational shutdown, reputational damage, loss of customer trust, and regulatory penalties. The true power of the MVC model is that it enables business leaders to maintain service, protect brand equity, and preserve strategic momentum during a crisis. In many industries, the ability to continue – even partially – during disruption can be the difference between survival and failure.

Moreover, embracing the MVC concept fosters a more mature, long-term view of cyber risk. It encourages organisations to re-evaluate their investment priorities, not only spending on preventative controls but also building resilience into infrastructure, workflows, and culture. This shift from a reactive to a proactive mindset positions businesses to navigate uncertainty more effectively and emerge stronger from adversity.

In a world where cyber incidents are no longer anomalies but expectations, organisations must stop treating security and continuity as separate disciplines. They are deeply intertwined. The MVC is not merely a contingency plan, it is a resilience architecture that aligns operational capability with strategic risk tolerance.

Ultimately, businesses that adopt the Minimum Viable Company framework are not simply responding to threats – they are building future-ready organisations that can adapt, recover, and lead, even in the most hostile conditions. In doing so, not only are they safeguarding their data and systems, but also their reputation and long-term viability.