For retailers, the holiday shopping season puts operational resilience to the test as transaction volumes surge, distribution networks operate at peak capacity, and customer expectations for fast, seamless fulfillment intensify.
Behind the scenes, retailers depend on an increasingly interconnected environment of applications, suppliers, facilities, employees, and third-party services to keep products moving. This concentration of activity also makes the holiday season an attractive period for cyberattacks.
However, the biggest risk isn’t simply that a retailer gets breached or that an application goes offline. During the 2025 holiday shopping season, Deloitte forecast total retail sales would grow 2.9% to 3.4% year over year, while e-commerce sales were expected to grow 7% to 9%. That growth represents significant revenue at stake: when a cyberattack disrupts a critical service during peak shopping season, the impact can quickly ripple across operations, disrupting orders, employee access, suppliers and customer experiences at precisely the time demand is highest.
For retailers preparing for another high-pressure holiday season in 2026, cybersecurity planning needs to be connected to enterprise resilience. With online sales expected to grow faster than the broader retail market, the ability to understand operational dependencies, prioritize critical services, and recover quickly can directly influence how much revenue a disruption puts at risk.
A Cyberattack Is Only the Beginning
Security teams are rightly focused on detecting, containing, and remediating threats. But once a disruption occurs, executives have to answer fundamental business questions: What is impacted? What happens next? What is the financial exposure? What should we prioritize?
A cyberattack against an e-commerce application, for example, may initially appear to be an IT problem. But that application may support order processing or customer service capabilities that may depend on other applications, employees, suppliers, and facilities. A disruption in one area can therefore create a cascade of consequences elsewhere. During an ordinary business period, teams may have more flexibility to absorb those effects, but the holiday season leaves less room for ambiguity.
The issue goes beyond a security team identifying the initial incident. Leaders need to understand the operational consequences and financial exposure at decision speed so they can determine what needs to happen next.
A cyberattack against an e-commerce application, for example, may initially appear to be an IT problem. But that application may support order processing or customer service capabilities that may depend on other applications, employees, suppliers, and facilities. A disruption in one area can therefore create a cascade of consequences elsewhere. During an ordinary business period, teams may have more flexibility to absorb those effects, but the holiday season leaves less room for ambiguity.
The issue goes beyond a security team identifying the initial incident. Leaders need to understand the operational consequences and financial exposure at decision speed so they can determine what needs to happen next.
Peak Season Magnifies Disruption Exposure
Retailers already understand the importance of forecasting logistics for seasonal demand, and cyber resilience requires the same level of preparation.
A retailer should understand which services are most critical during peak periods and the dependencies that support them. A single customer-facing service may depend on:
- Applications and infrastructure
- Employees and operational teams
- Warehouses and other facilities
- Payment and technology providers
- Suppliers and logistics partners
- Business processes that connect each part of the operation
The challenge is that traditional plans and documentation may not provide enough information to make those decisions quickly. A recovery plan can identify how an individual system is supposed to be restored. Still, executives need to understand the broader business consequences: which services are affected, how that impact could spread, and which recovery actions will protect the business most effectively. That distinction becomes especially important during peak shopping season, when Deloitte projected $1.61 trillion to $1.62 trillion in total U.S. retail sales from November through January, including as much as $310.7 billion in e-commerce sales. With that much revenue flowing through the retail ecosystem, every hour of disruption can put a meaningful share of a retailer’s peak-season sales opportunity at risk.
Resilience Requires a Model, Not More Documentation
Many organizations have spent years building business continuity plans, disaster recovery procedures, and cybersecurity playbooks. While those resources remain valuable, documentation alone does not give leaders a current picture of how disruption will move through the enterprise.
This is where a service-and-dependency model becomes important. Rather than treating applications, suppliers, facilities, processes and teams as disconnected pieces of information, a continuously curated model encodes the relationships between them. That means the potential impact of a disruption can be computed rather than manually reconstructed during an incident.
For a retailer, this could mean understanding the downstream consequences of losing a critical payment service or supplier before the holiday rush begins.
Instead of asking, “Do we have a plan for this scenario?” leaders can ask, “Do we understand the exposure, and do we know what decision we need to make if this occurs?”
From Exposure to Action
Effective resilience can be viewed through three connected stages.
First, organizations need to understand where a retailer is exposed to disruption, which might include critical customer-facing services, seasonal suppliers, fulfillment operations, or technology dependencies.
Next, organizations can examine how a disruption could affect the broader enterprise. What happens to dependent services? Which processes are affected? Where could a cyber incident create second- or third-order consequences?
Finally, leaders need to determine what to do. If everything cannot be restored simultaneously, which services should receive priority? What recovery sequence best protects critical operations, customers, and financial performance given available resources and constraints?
This moves resilience beyond preparedness as a documentation exercise and toward a decision capability.
Don’t Wait for the Incident to Discover the Recovery Priority
One of the biggest mistakes an organization can make is trying to reconstruct its dependencies after a disruption has already occurred. Retailers should use the months leading into peak shopping periods to test their assumptions.
Consider a scenario in which ransomware takes a critical technology service offline during the busiest shopping week of the year. A traditional exercise might ask whether the service can be restored. A stronger resilience exercise asks broader questions:
What is impacted?
Which customer, employee, fulfillment and supply chain services depend on the affected capability?
What happens next?
Which additional services, suppliers or processes could be affected if the disruption continues?
What is the financial exposure?
How could lost transactions, delayed fulfillment, operational costs and customer impacts translate into financial exposure?
What should we prioritize?
Given limited resources and competing recovery requirements, which services should be restored first?
Answering those questions before an incident gives executives a much stronger foundation for decision-making when pressure is highest.
Cybersecurity and Resilience Need to Share the Same Picture
Cybersecurity cannot eliminate every threat, just as business continuity cannot prevent every disruption. The objective is not to create a plan for every conceivable scenario. It is to understand where disruption would matter most and make better decisions when it occurs.
That requires security, IT, operations, supply chain, and business leaders to work from a shared understanding of the enterprise. Security teams need to understand the operational consequences of an attack, while business leaders need visibility into the dependencies and recovery capabilities that will determine what happens next.
For retail executives, that shared picture can also connect cyber risk to financial performance. Instead of treating resilience investment as simply the cost of maintaining a program, leaders can evaluate where disruption exposure is greatest, which capabilities are most critical, and where resilience investment can have the greatest impact.
The Holiday Season Is the Test
Peak shopping periods will always create additional pressure for retailers. More transactions, tighter delivery expectations, and greater dependence on interconnected services naturally increase the consequences of disruption.
The retailers best positioned to withstand a cyberattack during the holiday season will be those that can move beyond the initial security event and quickly understand the broader business impact. They will know what is affected, what happens next, what the financial exposure looks like, and what needs to be prioritized.
That is the difference between having a collection of response plans and having an enterprise resilience decision capability. When every minute of peak-season disruption can carry a meaningful business cost, knowing what to do next isn’t just a cybersecurity advantage. It’s a business imperative.
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About the Author:
Richard Barnett is Chief Marketing Officer at Fusion Risk Management, where he helps global enterprises strengthen resilience in the face of disruption, complexity, and uncertainty. He focuses on helping organizations move beyond reactive risk management by connecting cybersecurity, operational risk, and business continuity to better decision-making and business outcomes.
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