A guide to business resilience

Dealing with cascading challenges requires a more nimble, holistic, agile approach than is possible with traditional event-based resilience planning. A forward-looking, integrated business resilience approach prepares the entire organization for response and recovery when several disruptions happen at once.

What is business resilience?

Business resilience refers to an organization’s ability to minimize the frequency of disruption, as well as the impact on the market, customers, and internal stakeholders. It is achieved by removing unnecessary boundaries between crisis management, operational resilience, and business continuity to successfully integrate both readiness and response capabilities. This objective is best achieved through influence flowing down from your leadership team to the rest of the organization.

Taking a holistic and integrated approach will help you achieve a level of resilience that ensures you can confidently mitigate and manage risk and effectively prepare to respond and recover from disruptions. When done right, business resilience enables you to replace that nagging feeling of uncertainty with confidence. And that’s important because it’s no longer about if disruption will occur; It’s when it will occur.

A five-step framework to achieve business resilience.

You can read a guide on how to achieve business resilience here. It includes a five-step framework to achieve business resilience:

  1. Understand Context
  2. Develop a Digital Model
  3. Employ Vulnerability Management
  4. Gain Situational Awareness
  5. Build Response Competence.

Other Continuity Central business resilience resources

Resources related to business resilience include:

  • Building business resilience; a multi-faceted challenge: KPMG and the University of Queensland have jointly published a new paper on the subject of business resilience. ‘Building business resilience; a multi-faceted challenge’ is based on the outcomes of a collaborative workshop held with numerous senior executives from various public and private organizations. The paper explores how to build business resilience through the concepts of the customer and community, cyber security, supply chain, ESG and critical infrastructure.

  • The state of business resilience: How to thrive in a pandemic world. A report looking at the current trends and challenges to business resilience.

  • Tooling for optimal resilience: This paper looks at the latest definitions of business resilience, describes the structure of a business resilience management system, and explains why sharing and collecting information is at the heart of a resilient organization.


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Business continuity?

Business continuity can be defined as 'the processes, procedures, decisions and activities to ensure that an organization can continue to function through an operational interruption'. Read more about the basics of business continuity here.

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