Cutover spoke and exhibited at BCI World 2019, a two-day conference exploring the theme “Investing in Resilience”. What a great couple of days! We’d like to say a huge thank you to all the organizers, speakers and attendees involved in the event.
Our team had a lot of insightful conversations with visitors to our booth, with many taking part in our resilience survey.
The survey asked a number of business continuity and resilience professionals about the current state of operational resilience within their organization. After collating all the answers, the results are in...
Nearly 36% of the people surveyed said that they are dissatisfied with their company’s level of operational resilience today. This is concerning, given how critical resilience is for an organization to both survive and thrive. An organization’s ability to protect and sustain the core business services that are key for its clients, both during business as usual and when experiencing operational stress, is of utmost importance - especially in today’s complex business landscape.
The survey also revealed that 68% of participants are still using conference calls, spreadsheets and manual processes to manage the process of resilience testing. While this has long been the status quo, using this mix of ill-suited tools and processes means that testing is not as effective as it could be. This approach is inefficient, risky and costly in the long run. Many organizations are storing recovery plans in non-standard formats, such as documents and spreadsheets, which makes them difficult to execute when an incident arises, as well as making it hard to create, update and test plans.
Companies using these outdated methods to plan test events are often spending weeks or months in preparation and, upon execution, are still not able to accurately test the organization’s true ability to respond in a crisis. The fast pace of technology evolution means that static documents are no longer advanced enough to manage our landscape of complex change; a dynamic solution is needed.
The good news is that operational resilience is a key priority for companies in 2020.
Almost 96% of all survey participants stated that they were planning to improve their company’s operational resilience next year. The drivers behind these improvement plans were split: 33% were driven by service and application resilience testing, 8% by repetitive events such as building power downs, 21% by data center failover testing, 21% by audit and regulation and 17% were driven by other reasons, including continuous improvement and overall resilience advancement. Today’s business landscape is complex. With increases in the sophistication of cyber threats, higher customer expectations with regards to 24/7 availability, greater risk connected to internal change failures and increased regulatory scrutiny, companies need to ensure they have appropriate measures in place to enable strong operational resilience.
If you’re interested in learning more about best practices in operational resilience, feel free to contact us for an informal chat. If you’d like to read more, download our resilience infographic to learn how Cutover supports companies in their operational resilience journey.