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.