In an unpredictable world where COVID-19 has tested business institutions as never before, setbacks are inevitable. An adverse event can be incidents of devasting natural disasters, cyber-attacks, pandemics, hardware failures, fire disasters, unpredictable weather, technology migrations or any network outages.
An organisation can be operationally resilient if it effectively battens downs the hatches and weathers the storm. A proposed framework for operational risk oversight should now proactively be implemented in the operational resilience strategy. Firms have a unique opportunity to refine their understanding of ‘severe’ and ‘extreme’ disruption scenarios and focus on the tolerance levels of disruption.
Incidents from such extreme conditions can impact retail customers who expect services are always on the spot. By identifying your organisation’s vulnerabilities, you must focus on each component and adapt your operational resilience efforts to meet today’s challenges. Business continuity focuses on keeping the business going, even in adverse events and helps to prepare for and recover from disruptions quickly, with minimal impact.
Table of Contents
What is meant by operational resilience?
Operational resilience isn’t new, but firms can prevent and react to the changing environment. With plenty of operational disruption happening in these covid times, firms are updating and building a defence system that protects and operates through all circumstances. While we don’t know how a disaster may come in any form, operational resilience may help the business bounce back.
Need for Operational Resilience Strategy
A well-defined resilience plan with actionable steps can help your business tolerate and survive extreme situations. It will help to measure how to keep the company afloat in times of disaster and be accountable for critical business processes. Such risk management evaluation can help a business recover from any unexpected event and get back on its feet.
Part of the challenge is contributing to unexpected circumstances and planning remedies if a company suddenly experiences a data breach or unforeseen events. Having such a full – proof strategy can keep the business operational in times of disaster because it has some distinct features that can adapt to the changes in the environment.
What is the Four-stage resilience lifecycle?
Developing a relevant strategy in a particular situation can be an overwhelming challenge. Let’s check in detail how the system of operational resilience works. Developing an end-to-end solution to respond and adapt to the changes active resilience lifecycle goes through four stages –
Anticipate
To counter emergency events, get the operational resilience system to anticipate all what-if scenarios and plan the best outcomes. Using different tools and analyses, it identifies which processes are critical for the given events and comes up with all the possible results.
Prevent
The process of operational resilience tends to rely on corrective tools and apply them during any emergency. It follows a particular plan wherever automation is necessary and counters the incident before they make any negative impact. Instead of panicking, by implementing operation resilience in operations and everyday processes, businesses can monitor and optimise incidents and prevent the consequences.
Respond and recover
In the wake of a crisis, the system of operational resilience acts on the detailed continuity plan prepared beforehand to respond to adverse circumstances. Businesses with this system may panic and make uninformed or accurate communication with customers or suppliers, causing more harm. Therefore, to fill the gaps in the business defence system, review and approve the operational resilience blueprint plan and then implement it to reduce and recover the risks.
Adapt
Effective operational resilience has programs in place to bounce back from disasters. It doesn’t wait for disaster to strike and helps organisations adapt and counter disruptions better. In an emergency, when the chances are prone to poor communication and unnecessary split-second decisions, operational resilience systems review and analyse results and communicate vital conclusions to the workforce.
Conclusion
As Operational resilience can prevent any harmful impact on the delivery of essential business products or services, its holistic view influences the organisation to manage risk on all potential threats. This system has proved its mettle among several industries; therefore, in the coming years, every business is embarking on employing a resiliency plan in their operational units. It helps the company prepare for all risks with needed assessments and tools. Given the significant risks, operational resiliency can be consistently developed over time with the help of the employees and push them to help the business to succeed in nearly any situation.