Business Resilience – The Transforming Trend for Business Continuity

By what practice should the business continuity evolve to deal with the threats and prospects faced by organizations not only today but for the future as well? How much is business resilience necessary? When discussing resilience, how would we ensure that the focus stays with business and its key processes rather than with technology? Let us explore these questions in discussion.

“A holistic management process that identifies potential threats to an organization and the impacts to business operations those threats, if realized, might cause, and which provides a framework for building organizational resilience with the capability of an effective response that safeguards the interests of its key stakeholders, reputation, brand and value-creating activities.”.

A number of people across the globe ask the same question, what is Resilience? With regard to business continuity, resilience has regularly been used in context to IT and organization’s facilities environment. A high accessibility PC framework provides resilience to failure, for instance – in context to IT - two identical servers mirrored together, where the failure of any one would be detected by the other, allowing the other one to take on the responsibility so that access to the system continues uninterrupted. In context to facilities – A data centre may possibly be protected by N+1 Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPS), air-conditioning units, stand-by generator sets, etc. or a Work Area Recovery site may be created to take care of failure of the primary site.

a) Are you actually adding resilience? Making available a UPS has just moved one failure point to a device.

b) IT resilience is not an alternative to organisational resilience.

c) Poorly implemented resilience adds more failure points. It is complex to make resilient architectures work effectually and prone to failure if designed or functioned by the inexperienced.

d) Unmonitored Resilience is useless.

Settling these gaps and confusions actually is one part of the picture when creating business or organisational resilience, it is required to focus on a broad spectrum, apart from just keeping the focus on technology and facilities. Business resilience should be taken as a goal.

The Business Continuity Institute (BCI – www.thebci.org ) defines Organisational Resilience as “the capability to anticipate key events from emerging trends, constantly adapt to change and to bounce back from disruptive and damaging incidents”.

These incidents may broadly impact an organisation in the following categories:

• People

• Building

• IT

• Information

• Utilities

• Supplies  

Business Continuity has been engaged upon a defending resilience posture, containing three fundamental building blocks:

a) Recovery

b) Hardening 

c) Redundancy

All of them are widely recognized as essential components for effective business continuity plans. A defensive play might be good in shielding the organization and its revenue system but it does not support the bottom line. A static initiative (a bomb-shelter or an insurance mentality) might make you feel secure but is rarely updated.

The basic concept of business resilience is about:

a) Safe-guarding the organization

b) Toning down the business and technology risks

c) Ensuring  continuity of business operations

d) Reducing labour associated with programs related to resilience

e) Aiding continuous and smooth IT applications and business transactions

f) Empowering the organization to become accustomed and deal with business and/or market opportunities

The application of business continuity is changing to grow into more and more concerned with avoidance/prevention of disruptions and business resilience is supporting this trend. In the institution of business continuity, business resilience is finally transforming from an IT-centric scope to a holistic business concept. Conclusively and probably most importantly, business resilience is moving business continuity consultants into the field of handling opportunities or upside risks. Maybe it will change business continuity from an overhead activity into the mainstream activity by encouraging the comprehension of new revenue streams and additionally securing those that are already in existence.

Taking the concept to a new level business continuity summit is being organized on 8th FEBRUARY, 2018 - RIYADH, KSA. The summit following the theme, “Leadership through Resilience” support Saudi Arabia’s vision for the year 2030. The summit also aims to unite the best global and regional minds in both Business Resilience and IT Resilience. The discussions and presentations will address new ideas, thoughts and way outs to proactively handle all stages of Business Continuity Management implementation life-cycle, which is not just limited to business continuity and IT DR, but also cater to the needs of Crisis Management and Emergency Response, Information Security and safety. 

Watch highlights from previous summits here. http://www.bcm-ksa.com/2016-summit/.

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