The Evolution of Resilience in 2022

Disruption is Business as Usual

Over the years, there have been different drivers of organizational change, but now there is a larger sense of urgency around resilience because – if you’ve learned anything over the past two years or so – disruption is business as usual. Resilience is no longer a “nice to have.” We’re at this inflection point where the need to be resilient is turbocharging organizational and process optimization. Resilience is now on the agendas of C-suites, there is an emergence of regulatory requirements, and new threats arise constantly. Since disruption is the new norm, enterprises are being forced to factor in resilience as a core element of their growth.

If we think further about the tailwinds that are driving enterprises to really factor in resilience as a core element of growth, we see:

• An acceleration of digital transformation in the risk and operational resilience space
• Growing regulatory attention and the matrixed requirements for enterprises to comply to
• Organizations moving away from viewing resilience as a “check-the-box” exercise and toward viewing it as an integral part of their company and strategy
• Reliability and brand reputation being viewed as key competitive differentiators

While many organizations are at varying stages on their journey to resilience, it is necessary to acknowledge that being resilient goes hand in hand with being proactive. 

From Reactive to Proactive

As the push toward resilience continues, companies are moving from a reactive to a proactive approach. Organizations must understand how their business works, how it breaks, and how to put it back together again. By identifying what application sites, processes, and people are critical in delivering important business services and products, you can really focus on what matters and cut through the chaos. This in turn unlocks agility as well as new levels of visibility into your business. Organizations must not only be able to deploy signals to stop threats before they escalate, but also spot opportunities for future improvement. With increasing competition and customer expectations, there’s this race to deliver great experiences, which is why it’s more important than ever to really prioritize the actions that matter most to your customer.

The companies that are on this accelerated journey toward resilience are leveraging technology to go from reactive to proactive, and it starts with curating data from across the organization. Deciding what products and services are critical and mapping those interdependencies will, ultimately, help to build a more holistic view of your organization. This in turn allows you to leverage real-time data to make informed decisions, engage the right people at the right times, and end up in a place where you’re proactively identifying risks and mitigating those threats.

At every stage of response, risk and resiliency are delivering visibility, agility, and engagement. For example, you can anticipate and prevent disruption by leveraging your data foundation, understanding criticality and impact, and identifying where to focus through IT risk assessment software. Also, you can leverage that real-time data to better understand things like your third party’s business and cyber health.

On the path to resilience, organizations must understand their business from end-to-end, track trends to prevent potential issues from escalating, and test resilience through scenario modeling and simulation to determine how prepared they are for disruption. This helps you identify those gaps and opportunities and then test and analyze the impact of organizational changes before they might happen.

Moving Forward in 2022

With this new visibility and focus on resilience, the time is now! We’re seeing disruptive events happen with more frequency as well as the overlapping of events. There are new, emerging threats to account for constantly – things like the pandemic to cyber security to supply chain. And everyone is also competing to deliver excellent customer experiences, so if your organization wants to continue to deliver on their customer promise and maintain a competitive advantage, then being proactive should be top of mind.

Leave those static plans behind and focus on dynamic preparedness. Continue to learn from your programs – find those opportunities for enhancement and build an informed perspective of your organization and your ecosystem.