A new survey-based report published by The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) claims that organizational resilience uptake is linked to the growth of cloud. The report, sponsored by Sungard Availability Services, explores the role of resilience in a world with a growing cloud presence.
Organizational resilience, as defined by the EIU study, means that managers are no longer reactive but instead proactively anticipate and prepare for both sudden and gradual strategic shifts. How companies build resilience must be linked to an organization's overall business strategy and requires broad mobilisation of corporate capabilities across an organization and strong corporate leadership. The report shows that 72 percent of French, UK and USA based executives surveyed believe that organizational resilience will grow as an organizational priority over the next three years; and 71 percent of respondents say that their organization has clearly defined roles and responsibilities to ensure organizational resilience.
The report makes a link between organizational resilience and the cloud. “The cloud brings many benefits including collaboration and cost savings,” says Carolyn Whelan, the report's editor. “But because of its fragmented nature the cloud also brings risks. Our survey shows that organizational resilience will grow in importance along with the cloud, to capture value from and respond to its challenges.” The report states that ‘organizational resilience is emerging as a critical lever of a successful cloud expansion’.
The survey found that nearly two-thirds (65 percent) of executives say that more than half of their organizations' systems are already cloud-based and 78 percent say that their use of cloud computing will increase in the next three years. The most commonly cited cloud risks were security breaches and leaks of confidential information (53 percent), disruptions caused by cyber-attacks (52 percent) and potential failure to deliver product or services (46 percent).
