The real distinctions between the varying aspects of resilience management – operational, organizational, cyber, etc. – seem like they might push against an integrated approach to resilience. But in practice, resilience management must be holistic to be effective.
Why’s that, and what are the advantages of integrated resilience management? Read on to find out.
What’s involved in resilience management?
For starters, look at what resilience management must accomplish.
Resilience management activities must work together to prevent disruption from happening by anticipating and preparing for likely sources of disruption. Should those disruptions occur, as they’re likely to, resilience management must then respond and help companies recover as well as withstand and sustain.
But to do so, resilience management must stitch together end-to-end activities, such as operations, technology, workforce, supply chain, data, finance, reputation, and customer experience.
Add to that, it’s been established that resilience management must cover the following solution areas:
- Threat intelligence
- Incident and crisis management
- Situational awareness
- Business continuity
- Risk and compliance
- Security operations
Why individual point solutions don’t work for resilience management
Don’t companies already have individual point solutions and activities in place to cover these solutions areas?
The short answer is (likely) yes. The longer answer is that’s (unfortunately) the problem.
Why a problem?
Well, if resilience itself can only be achieved if all solution areas are working in harmony, why invest in point solutions that lead to the siloing of operations?
Indeed, this siloing effect has been shown to be one of the keenest challenges to building an integrated resilience capability. Such a capability helps companies foresee, prepare for, and adapt to disruption.
Instead of uniting, though, siloing point solutions actively divide – meaning that when a risk that cuts across solution areas materializes, they aren’t able to respond effectively.
That’s how risk multiples.
How, exactly?
Well, having distinct point solutions for the varying aspects of resilience management means companies don’t have all the capabilities they need in one place.
More specifically, their resilience data and information remain fragmented throughout the resilience lifecycle. Information remains siloed.
What’s more, point solutions – unlike integrated resilience management software platforms – themselves each offer different user experiences. That tends to mean a greater training lift for Resilience Managers when responding to cross-cutting crises as they will lack familiarity with tools and workflows.
Further, point solutions rarely manage different scales of event. They either manage routine issues or crises, never the two – even though most crises can be sourced back to the day to day.
Most significantly in an age of strained budgets, having multiple point solutions, many of which do similar things and address similar risks, gets expensive quickly.
Total cost of ownership balloons when having to make crucial updates to multiple systems.
Adding insult to injury, a lack of consolidated reporting and analysis also increases compliance risk, while making it more likely that stakeholders won’t learn everything there is to learn from a disruption they’ve weathered.
What can be done, instead? Ensure your integrated resilience management platform promotes collaboration, which will lead to increased information sharing, communication, and higher situational awareness.
Not sure what capabilities you need? Download our Resilience Management Buyer’s Guide for more.
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