Agile Resilience in Security for Small and Medium-Sized Businesses

Small businesses face many of the same cyber threats as larger organisations but often lack equivalent budgets, specialist personnel, and formal security operations capability. This paper proposes Agile Resilience in Security for Enterprises (ARISEs), a lightweight cyber-resilience framework and maturity model designed for resource-constrained small businesses. ARISE adapts prevention, detection, response, and recovery into an agile lifecycle so that organisations can improve cybersecurity maturity progressively rather than through a single large compliance project. The study combines framework benchmarking, a practical interpretive case used to position ARISE within reflexive thematic analysis (RTA) and maturity-model benchmarking, and quantitative machine-learning experiments using the UNSW-NB15 intrusion-detection dataset. The experimental component evaluates selected Weka classifiers, including J48, JRip, Random Tree, Decision Table, and Naive Bayes, to examine whether low-cost tools can support network intrusion detection in small-business contexts. Results show very high aggregate performance for tree- and rule-based classifiers, while class-level outcomes highlight that overall accuracy can conceal weak detection of minority attack categories. The paper therefore positions ARISE as a practical, iterative, and standards-informed framework that complements, rather than replaces, enterprise-grade security operations. Its value lies in giving small businesses an accessible starting point for identifying risk, selecting controls, improving cyber awareness, detecting suspicious activity, responding consistently, and learning from incidents.