What is Business Resilience?

Business Resilience Explained

Why is business resilience a priority?

The risk of business disruption is always present. But recent events—namely the global health crisis—have led to a renewed and intensified focus on business resilience for organizations across the globe. Business leaders and IT decision-makers now recognize that the unexpected can happen and should be planned for accordingly.

A prescriptive and reactive approach has long been the foundation of business continuity. But to successfully navigate future disruptions, business leaders will need to adopt a new mindset—one that emphasizes the IT agility needed to achieve business resilience.

What is business resilience vs. business continuity?

Business continuity is the capability of an organization to deliver products and services within acceptable timeframes at predefined capacity during a disruption. A business continuity plan is documented information that guides an organization to respond to a disruption.

Business resilience is an organization's ability to absorb stress, recover critical functionality, and thrive in altered circumstances. In short, it positions organizations to prepare for anything.

Traditionally, business resilience was IT-focused. It meant ensuring that applications and data would remain available and secure during a disruptive event such as a cyber attack—provided the disruption lasted only hours or days and affected facilities or workers in just one region.

Now business resiliency needs to be about more than just protecting a company's IT operations. Organizations must be able to adapt operations in response to continuous change as well as major events and continue to thrive.

Until recently, few businesses had business resilience or business continuity plans for global events that would last for months, result in extended travel shutdowns, and prompt lasting changes to how a company operates and where its employees work. 

Considerations for business resiliency planning

The ability to adapt fast is now a critical measure of success for businesses. Here are some things to consider when an organization creates a plan for developing business resilience.

Business recovery risks

What would happen if the business experienced a disruption or damage that impacted its ability to conduct day-to-day operations for an extended period? Risks can range from supply chain operations and extensive property damage to loss of critical staff.  How will the business ensure continued availability and access to applications and data? What strategies should be implemented and what resources need to be aligned?

Employee safety

Can the business track the health, safety, and availability of both remote and onsite workers in the event of a disaster or major disruption? What safety policies should be in place and how should they be communicated? What training is needed?

When people return to the workplace after a disruptive event, how will the business continue to promote their safety? For example, many organizations are investing in technology to help people maintain social distancing and to conduct contact tracing as the health crisis persists.  

Financial loss mitigation

The longer a business is unable to operate normally, the greater the risk for financial loss. To mitigate that risk, business resilience planning should consider what systems, processes, and people are most essential to mission-critical operations—and outline steps for restoring their functionality as quickly as possible.

Other considerations

Other questions an organization may want to address:

• What can we do to protect our brand and reputation?
• How can we optimize business decision-making during a crisis?
• How can we maintain our service to customers and partners not only following a disruption, but also in response to changing trends and expectations?

Strategies for building business resilience

These strategies can also help to increase IT agility and deliver an optimum application experience.

Preparing for the future of work

Business resiliency means being able to adapt to gradual but significant change as well as sudden disruptions. This can mean transforming culture, workplaces, and workflows by investing in new collaboration tools and technology.

Increasing cyber resilience

Cyber resilience helps to build business resilience, whether it's understanding how best to secure a remote or hybrid workforce or creating simpler but more effective cybersecurity practices for the organization. 

Accelerating a multicloud strategy

Using multiple cloud providers for can increase business resilience, allowing organizations to mitigate the risk of downtime and service outages. Moving between cloud services creates agility and makes it possible to scale services up or down depending on need. Organizations can bring new IT infrastructure online in minutes and rapidly provision computing resources to users working from anywhere.

Multicloud networking white paper (PDF)

Planning for IT infrastructure resilience

As part of reimagining and redesigning the workforce and workplace, organizations need to make sure that their IT infrastructure is also resilient. This includes having the ability to provide highly secure virtual desktops to all workers, wherever they are located, and to optimize on-premises and cloud resources continuously to maintain performance and control costs.