How to build operational resilience in your organisation

Operational resilience is the framework that businesses and institutions use to assess their capacity to prevent, withstand, mitigate, and recover from disruptive incidents such as cyber-attacks and IT outages. This is with the goal of reducing downtime, reputational damage, and financial impact.

A misconception about operational resilience is that it’s not an essential consideration. However, when we consider that downtime can cost $9,000 per minute for large organisations and up to $5 million an hour in finance and healthcare organisations, the intrinsic value and importance of operational resilience becomes clear.

It ensures business continuity- even in the event of ransomware attacks or organisational disruption.

Here’s how to build a robust operational resilience framework to future-proof your organisation.

6 key steps to increase your operational resilience

Step one: Audit your IT processes and systems

You must assess the components of your minimum viable organisation. What we mean by this is identifying the core systems and processes that are essential to your organisation’s basic operations.

From here, you can understand where your vulnerabilities lie and set ‘impact tolerances’. This means you now have a clear understanding of how much disruption your systems can tolerate and where in your IT systems or cyber security defence requires attention to patch vulnerabilities.

It’s key to also understand your dependencies on third party providers, such as tech vendors and managed IT service providers, and ensure these third parties can support your operational resilience goals with their own processes and practices.

Step two: Strengthen your cyber security defences

Cyber threats are the biggest challenge to your organisation’s operational resilience. These can include:

• Internal threats and human error
• Data breaches
• Ransomware attacks
• Phishing attacks

 These are just a few of the cyber incidents that can stop your organisation in its tracks and irreparably damage your customer or client relationships.

As you will have already completed step one, you’ll be aware of where your vulnerabilities to cyber threats are in your systems and processes, so now it’s essential to remediate these. The actions that your organisation takes to do this can include:

• Implement 24/7 cyber incident response measures
• Enlist expert cyber security consultancy to rigorously manage risks through expert measures such as penetration testing and phishing simulations
• Using managed extended detection and response services to enhance your endpoint management with continuous monitoring and threat detection, powered by AI

Step three: Backup your systems

Effective backup solutions are a core component of operational resilience, as they ensure business- critical data is secure and recoverable in the event of organisational disruption. This is key to minimising business downtime in the event of a cyber-attack.

Our managed backup solutions are a more cost-effective option to painstakingly backing up all your critical data in house. Not only is your data automatically backed up on-premises or to a public or private cloud, but it is then fully replicated to a secondary site. This data is then proactively managed, monitored, and tested by Celerity as your managed IT services provider.

Step four: create a detailed disaster recovery plan

A disaster recovery plan allows your organisation to respond quickly and efficiently to disruptions. It’s important to include plans for various kinds of disruptions, including cyber-attacks and IT outages, as well as:

• Internal and external communication plans in the event of a large incident
• Clear steps for containing the impact of the incident and recovering business operations
• The roles and responsibilities of teams and individuals in this plan

Teams should be consistently reminded of this, and new starters should study this as part of their onboarding, ensuring downtime is kept to an absolute minimum.

Step five: get expert IT and cyber security managed services

Managed IT service providers are key to achieving operational resilience with cyber security managed services. This is because:

• They have access to the latest technology and leading expertise, making adapting to evolving threats less of a drain on internal resource
• They minimise human error due to their expertise, but also use of AI cyber security tools
• They can provide continuous 24/7 monitoring for constant threat detection
• They have a holistic understanding of the threats specific industries face and how to mitigate them

Operational resilience is not something to be left to chance- it's also too much for small teams to take on solo. To enlist an experienced managed IT service provider to protect your organisation and data from threats, get in touch.

Step six- continuously improve your operational resilience

Operational resilience is not something to ‘set and forget’- it’s a continuous process as threats (and your organisation) continue to evolve.

You should set a schedule to review your strategy, disaster recovery plan, third party providers, technologies, and processes. To ensure these reviews are impactful, you should leverage insights from your monitoring systems, analytics tools, and feedback from internal teams and external providers.

Key signs of progress in your operational resilience strategy include:

• Increased trust and confidence among teams and stakeholders
• Better co-ordination and knowledge-sharing between teams
• Reduced downtime and improved threat detection
• A through approach to compliance and efficient response plans
• Improved cyber security metrics, such as incident reporting rates and time to detect

Consolidate your organisation’s operational resilience

Operational resilience is about building a foundation for long-term success and future-proofing your organisation. Without operational resilience, you risk reputational damage, large financial losses, and expensive business downtime.

If your organisation is operationally resilient, you will ensure compliance, safeguard your business against costly downtime, and improve customer and stakeholder trust and satisfaction rates.

As a trusted IT managed service provider, who delivers expert cyber security managed services for organisations in both the private and public sector, we’re true experts in promoting operational resilience. Talk to us about how to keep your organisation and its data and systems secure, resilient, and recoverable.