The Show Must Go On: Building Cyber Resilience for Venues
Guest Post: Andy Jabbour, Gate 15
Every venue exists to deliver memorable experiences.
Whether it’s a sold-out concert, game day, convention, graduation, or community event, success depends on countless moving parts working together to deliver a safe, secure, and memorable experience. Fans expect to be entertained. Performers expect the show to go on. Sponsors expect their brands to be protected. Leadership expects operations to continue, even when things go wrong. Increasingly, cybersecurity is essential to delivering on those expectations.
The mistake many organizations make is treating cyber risk as primarily an IT issue. Firewalls, endpoint protection, vulnerability scanning, and monitoring are essential, but technology alone doesn't build resilience. Organizations that recover fastest from cyber incidents aren't necessarily the ones with the largest budgets or the most security tools. They’re the ones that have invested in preparation before an incident occurs. They’re the ones that prepare their people, processes, and leaders to respond together.
At Gate 15, we focus on protecting people, places, data, and dollars. One way we do that is through our 15 × 15 Best Practices, a practical framework for organizational cyber resilience. While every venue is different, four areas consistently deliver a strong return on investment and are ones every organization can begin strengthening today.
Start with an honest assessment. You can’t improve what you don’t understand. Before each season, teams assess their roster, identify gaps, and decide where to invest. Cybersecurity should be no different. Assess not only your controls, but also your governance, business processes, operational resilience, third-party event partners, and potential impacts on events and public safety. Whether you use the NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0, our 15 × 15 Best Practices, or another methodology, the key is to choose a framework and begin.
Develop plans people can actually use. Successful teams don't wing it; they build game plans and playbooks and practice them. Organizations need the same discipline. Incident response plans, corporate crisis management and crisis communications plans, business continuity and disaster recovery strategies, ransomware playbooks, and recovery procedures should be concise, practical, and tailored to the people who will use them, including executives, operations communications, facilities, security, legal, and IT. Plans that collect dust won't help on your toughest day.
Exercise before game day. Championship teams don’t simply show up ready to win. They practice fundamentals, test new strategies, and learn from mistakes before the scoreboard lights up. The first ransomware attack, payment system outage, insider threat, or operational technology disruption should not occur during a sold-out event. Tabletop exercises and simulations expose assumptions, improve coordination, strengthen relationships, and build confidence that practice delivers.
Learn from every incident. Great teams watch the film. They ask what worked, what didn't, and how they will improve next time. “What did we do well? Where did we fall short? Who missed their block?” Organizations should do the same. Every cyber event, operational disruption, near miss, or exercise offers valuable lessons. Thoughtful postmortems reinforce successes, identify gaps, and drive continuous improvement. These are hallmarks of resilient organizations.
These four practices are part of a broader resilience strategy that also includes strong identity and access management, vulnerability and patch management, network segmentation, secure backups, information sharing, awareness training, testing, and a culture in which security is everyone's responsibility.
Venues face a unique challenge because cybersecurity, physical security, public safety, and operations are inseparable. Ticketing systems, scoreboards, concessions, parking, payment systems, access control, building automation, broadcast operations, and public safety all depend on technology. A cyber incident rarely remains a cyber incident for long. It quickly becomes an operational challenge that affects guests, employees, partners, revenue, and reputation.
The objective isn't to eliminate every risk. That's impossible. The goal is to reduce the likelihood of disruption, prepare our teams to make informed decisions under pressure, and build the resilience needed to keep events running safely and to recover quickly when incidents occur. For organizations that host thousands, or tens of thousands, of people, that is ultimately what cybersecurity is about: protecting the experience, the business, and the community that depends on it. The goal isn't to eliminate every risk; that is impossible. The goal is to reduce disruption, prepare teams to make informed decisions under pressure, and build the resilience to keep events running safely during incidents. For organizations responsible for welcoming thousands, or tens of thousands, of guests, that's what cybersecurity is really about.
Prepared venues don’t happen by accident. Like championship teams, they’re deliberately built through assessment, planning, practice, and continuous improvement.
For more information on Gate 15 visit: https://gate15.global