Clean, Lean, and Operational: The Minimum Viable Company Approach to Cyber Resilience

In an era where cyberattacks, ransomware, and operational disruptions are not if but when, the concept of Minimum Viability is transforming how organisations approach cybersecurity and resilience planning. It's no longer enough to “bounce back” - today, you need to bounce forward with a strategy built for speed, clarity, and precision. That starts with minimum viability.

What is Minimum Viability

Minimum viability is not a product, tool, or a checkbox. It’s a business state - the combination of critical applications, assets, processes, and people required to fulfill your organisation’s core mission after a cyberattack or disaster. It’s about ensuring your organisation can function at its most essential level, even in the wake of major disruption.

Minimum viability is the bridge between a catastrophic event and full recovery - and it's the foundation for cyber resilience.

Why Cybersecurity Planning Must Start With Minimum Viability

Embracing the concept of minimum viability is no longer optional for organisations looking to thrive in today’s volatile cyber landscape.

It’s the Fastest Path to Operational Recovery

When a cyberattack strikes, you don’t need everything back - you need the right things back. Minimum viability focuses your recovery efforts on restoring the critical systems and data that allow you to deliver your mission allowing resumption of operations faster and with less confusion.

It Shifts the Focus from Continuity to Resilience

Traditional business continuity asked, “How do we keep things going?”
Minimum viability asks, “What do we absolutely need to get back online quickly and cleanly?”

It’s a modern approach that prioritises resilience, enabling you to bounce forward - not just return to normal.

It Enables Purposeful, Clean Recovery

In a post-breach environment, you can’t trust what’s been compromised. Recovery efforts must focus on restoring clean, validated environments and data. With minimum viability, you identify trusted recovery points and environments, ensuring you aren’t just reinfecting your systems.

It Anchors Your Cyber Recovery Architecture

A minimum viability strategy helps you build a cyber recovery architecture that includes:

• Immutable and indelible storage
• Dynamic scaling and portability across clouds
• Encryption and hardened infrastructure
• Automated threat detection and recovery workflows

This architecture allows for flexible, verifiable, and rapid recovery, regardless of where the attack lands.

It Brings Clarity During Chaos

When an incident happens, speed matters—but so does clarity. Minimum viability provides a documented, actionable plan that identifies:

• Critical systems and their dependencies
• Key personnel and processes
• The tiered order of recovery
• Tested and automated recovery steps

It helps to remove guesswork and uncertainty.

How to Plan for Minimum Viability

To successfully incorporate minimum viability into your cybersecurity strategy, start by answering these questions:

• Have you documented your mission-critical systems and processes?
• Do you know the cost of downtime per minute, hour, or day?
• Do you have a tiered recovery plan based on system criticality?
• Have you actually done test restores on your most critical applications and data?
• Are you confident you can cleanly recover without reintroducing threats?
• Can you recover into a different cloud or clean environment if needed?

If the answer to any of these is “no” or “not sure,” it’s probably time to prioritise minimum viability planning.

The Five Steps to Restoring Minimum Viability 

What does a modern cyber recovery approach look like? Here are 5 key steps:

1. Remediate Threats
   Contain and eradicate attackers and preserve forensic evidence with air-gapped snapshots of the compromised environment.
2. Restore Secure Access
   Rapidly rebuild and validate identity services like Active Directory or IAM to restore access to users and systems.
3. Restore Communications
   Re-establish email, chat, and collaboration platforms like Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace to enable team coordination.
4. Rebuild Infrastructure
   Use automated tools and known-clean golden images to restore essential infrastructure quickly and securely.
5. Recover Trusted Data
   Restore clean data into clean systems using isolated recovery environments and pre-tested clean points.

Minimum Viability: Your First Step to Continuous Business 

Minimum viability isn’t just about recovery—it’s about building the foundation for Continuous Business. With the right tools and best practices, such as those delivered by Commvault, your organisation can move from reactive to proactive, and from fragile to resilient.

Commvault supports this with:

• Cleanroom Recovery to isolate and test recovery plans
• Air-gapped, immutable backups
• Recovery-as-Code for rapid, repeatable infrastructure rebuilds
• Known-good golden images to restore trusted environments

In cybersecurity, hope is not a strategy. Minimum viability is.

It ensures that when - not if - an attack occurs, your organisation can respond with speed, precision, and confidence. It’s time to stop thinking about “back to normal” and start planning for “back to essential.”