Business today has grown increasingly complex have never needed resilience more than they do now. Building resilience, however, is not an easy task and organizations need to have the right tools in place in order to properly develop it. Regulators have also recently put an increased emphasis on operational resilience within organizations, with entities across the globe – such as the EU and UK’s FCA – recently implementing and updating guidelines on the topic.

Organizations need to be able to identify and manage emerging risks and disruptions, and often they need to be agile and quickly change course to avoid severe disruptions. To do that, you need 360-degree contextual awareness into interconnected risks scattered throughout the extended enterprise and monitor changes to the organizations risk profile and regulatory landscape in real time.

Manual processes and analyzing risk data in hundreds of different spreadsheets and documents can be time-consuming and cumbersome, and by the time it takes to finally analyze and process this data, it might either be too late or simply outdated, not to mention the overwhelming possibility of human error in manual solutions.

With the ever-growing threat from emerging risks lurking over the head of risk managers and back-office employees everywhere, resilience to an emerging risk should take center stage in the operational resiliency framework. It is becoming increasingly critical for organizations to link emerging cyber risks to critical business services and report on potential disruptions.

Setting Your Course for Operational Resiliency

Organizations need to gain a complete understanding of operational resilience, which requires a holistic comprehension of broader organizational objectives and strategy. Too often siloed departments within the organization focus their reporting on the technicalities of an emerging risk and disruption without outlining the potential upcoming impact to critical business services, and as a result, entirely missing the context of the business, relating to the issue and point of reporting vs. the connected impact throughout the business.

Operational resilience requires that the organization be able to quickly evaluate the situation at hand and adapt to what’s next. It requires a collaborative across different functions and departments to identify, monitor, and manage risk and its impact on the business. The risk management model that supports operational resilience is to identify critical business services and report any emerging risks and disruptions that could threaten the resilience of the organization and the impact on its critical business services – not an easy task with manual processes.

An integrated information and technology architecture is critical for organizations to build a more thoughtful and strategic approach to this operational risk strategy. Organizations need complete situational awareness and vision into risk scattered across systems, operations, processes, relationships, and data in order to fully achieve operational resiliency, and to gain an understanding of the full impact of risk throughout the organization holistically and its impact on strategy, objectives, and performance.