What Cybersecurity Teams Can Learn From Resilience and Team Sport

Cybersecurity teams can learn from team sport because defense is rarely about one person’s technical skill. Good outcomes depend on communication, discipline and the ability to recover quickly when pressure rises and plans start to break down.

Sports analogies help when they explain how teams prepare and respond together. The useful part is the practical lesson, not the metaphor itself.

What a Rugby Captain and a Cyber CEO Agree On

At Infosecurity Europe 2025 in London, TechRadar Pro spoke with former England rugby captain Dylan Hartley and Dominic List, CEO of security firm CyberOne, about what the two worlds share. Their answer was mostly about people. “In any industry, it’s all people – and if you want to get the best out of people, there’s so much crossover,” Hartley said.

Performance Under Pressure

List said the overlap shows up in “performance under pressure, of team playing,” and in practice that tries to “simulate failure, find the weak spots in the team, and find strategies to defend as well.” In one way, he argued, security is harsher than rugby. “The hacker only needs to get it right once, we need to get it right every single time.”

Teamwork as a Linchpin

Both fields depend on clear roles, fast communication and coordinated responses. A well-drilled rugby team and a well-run security operations center look alike in one key way: everyone knows their job when things go wrong. Hartley put it simply. You need “the best people, the best systems, and the best planning and execution.”

The Clock Is Shorter in Cyber

Rugby gives a team 80 minutes. Attackers don’t. List noted that “the first escalations can be sub one hour,” so defenders have to contain an intrusion inside that window. That is why drills and pre-agreed playbooks matter so much.

Getting the Basics Right

Both men came back to fundamentals. For List, that means IT hygiene such as firewalls, patching and locking down access, revisited now that companies are opening their systems to AI. Hartley, who now works in insurance, said many businesses are still underprepared for cyber risk. “If you’re a business owner, you’ve got your head in the sand if you’re not prepared.”

The Takeaway for Security Teams

The lesson from sport is practical. Pick the right people, train them under realistic pressure, make roles clear and get the basics right. Teams that rehearse failure before it happens recover faster when a real attack hits.

Frank Jones, CISSP

Frank Jones has loved computers from the age of 13. Frank got his hacking career started when he downloaded a war dialing program that he used to detect dial up modems in his hometown of Chicago. Frank Jones now works as a JAVA coder and cyber security researcher.