CYGNVS (pronounced Sig-nus) and the Future of Cyber Resilience: A Conversation with CEO Arvind Parthasarathi

When a cyberattack strikes, chaos often follows. Systems shut down, communications collapse, and leadership scrambles to understand what’s happening. Yet, amid the turmoil, one fact is clear: prevention alone is no longer enough.

That’s the insight that led Arvind Parthasarathi, veteran entrepreneur and founder of CYGNVS, to create a platform designed not just to prevent cyber incidents, but to help organizations respond to them with clarity, speed, and resilience.

From Academia to Startup Vision

After selling his previous startup, Parthasarathi turned his attention to giving back. Working pro bono, he joined Project Crossroads, a research initiative spanning nine global universities, including MIT, Stanford, Oxford, and Tokyo. Their mission: to establish a “standard of care” for boards and executives around cybersecurity oversight.

What he discovered was striking. “Organizations were pouring money into prevention,” he recalled, “but when incidents actually happened, the response was total chaos.”

That realization became the seed for CYGNVS (pronounced Sig-nus). Founded in January 2020 in a borrowed conference room, the company’s name draws from Cygnus, Latin for “swan.” Cyber incidents, often likened to Black Swan events, demand a new kind of preparedness—and CYGNVS was built to provide it.

The Out-of-Band Advantage

At the heart of CYGNVS is the idea of an “out-of-band” platform—a secure, independent command center organizations can rely on when traditional systems are compromised.

Attackers increasingly target corporate communications first—email, conferencing tools, even identity systems—precisely because that’s where crisis coordination happens. If the attackers are already listening in, a company’s defenses can crumble before they’re even activated.

Parthasarathi compares CYGNVS to a hurricane bunker: a place where legal teams, executives, and responders can gather safely, run playbooks, and protect privilege and confidentiality. Crucially, the system is company-owned—not tied to individual accounts vulnerable to insider threats or employee turnover.

Rethinking Crisis Response

Traditional incident response plans often sit buried in dusty binders or forgotten folders. In practice, they’re rarely updated, much less followed in a real emergency. CYGNVS transforms those outdated manuals into interactive, mobile-first workflows.

Rather than confronting leaders with an 80-page document during a breach, the platform drip-feeds tasks step by step—adaptive, guided, and designed for how people actually behave under stress. “Human beings in crisis don’t think the same way,” Parthasarathi explained. “So we shift the paradigm: two steps now, two steps later, until the organization executes as one.”

The result is muscle memory. Just as submariners drill daily for emergencies, CYGNVS clients run tabletop exercises frequently—not annually, but monthly, even weekly—building resilience into their organizational DNA.

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