Operational resilience is a company’s ability to withstand unexpected disruptions by staying ready to quickly react, adapt, and recover. It goes beyond business continuity (that is, staying prepared for specific threats). OpRes is more holistic and embedded in a company’s ethos. It’s driven by the understanding that unexpected disruptions will doubtless happen, and it demands a genuine commitment to staying flexible, resourceful, and unfazed when confronted with adverse events.
Operational resilience requires prioritization by leadership. Board members and executives must determine how much impact their company can withstand and commit to preventing that threshold from ever being crossed.
In our fast-paced, complex, and interdependent world, staying operational is paramount—and challenging.
Your customers expect ongoing reliability; without it, they’ll start turning to your competitors. You simply can’t afford to slip beneath a certain level of functionality.
Additionally, today’s businesses are so interconnected that disruptions can quickly spread through a multitude of organizations. That’s why legislators are demanding that institutions achieve operational resilience in order to avoid cascading failures throughout the economy. Legislation like the European Union’s DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act) not only imposes fines for noncompliance, but it signals the way of the future.
For the reasons mentioned above, almost any amount of downtime is dangerous to your business. The problems it causes include:
Without operational resilience, any unexpected disruption takes a larger toll. Recovery time is slower, chaos is greater, grievances are louder. You become more vulnerable and less likely to salvage what you’ve lost.
First, your organization’s leadership has to recognize the importance of OpRes and commit to its implementation. Governance, sponsorship, budget, and accountability all have to be established. Then you need to:
Operational resilience can never happen in isolation; it requires awareness and ability throughout your entire enterprise. And it is never complete—it requires ongoing assessment, strategizing, testing, improvement, and practice.
A specialized OpRes software platform can be invaluable for connecting, managing, and optimizing all these efforts.
The Fusion platform is purpose-built for operational resilience, enabling you to:
Learn how to build resilience with a hybrid testing approach that blends simulations, tabletops, and live drills for stronger preparedness.
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With Fusion, turn operational resilience into your competitive advantage—govern, test, and recover with clarity and speed.