Operational resilience news, research, and articles from around the world
This section of Continuity Central will keep you up to date with all the latest developments in operational resilience.
What is operational resilience?
Operational resilience has emerged from the banking and financial sector in recent years, led by various regulators. Operational resilience involves prevention of disruption, adaption to continue through disruption, prompt return to business as usual, and the ability to learn and evolve from both incidents and near misses. Operational resilience is a key issue on which boards and senior management should focus. Boards and senior management will make the final decisions on what the 'important business services' are that operational resilience in their organization focuses on, and what the associated impact tolerances are. According to the Bank of England impact tolerance means the maximum tolerable level of disruption to an important business service, including the maximum tolerable duration of a disruption.
Six steps to improving operational resilience
There are six key steps to improving operational resilience:
- Identify the most important business services and impact tolerance,
- Map the systems and processes that support these business services,
- Assess how the failure of a system or process could impact the business service,
- Test that resilience strategies meet the impact tolerance,
- Invest in the ability to respond and recover from disruptions,
- Communicate with timely information to customers and stakeholders.
Although it has been led by the financial sector, operational resilience is relevant to organizations of all types and sizes. To explore more see 'Getting Started with Operational Resilience'.