How do you score your business resilience?

Earlier this week we shared insights into business resilience and continuity planning, what it should involve and why it is important across an entire organisation, but for many it can be difficult to assess your current posture in order to implement effective action.

Our resilience scorecard aims to clarify and simplify the roadmap to a resilient organisation.

1. Planning: In the realm of planning, various processes are critical to ensuring resilience including the development of a resilience heatmap to identify vulnerabilities and strengths, conducting a business impact analysis to understand potential consequences, and performing cyber incident preparedness assessments to gauge readiness.
2. Development: These efforts focus on creating essential tools and frameworks to support resilience; establishing business continuity planning (BCP) policies to guide response efforts, crafting runbooks and strategies for efficient action during crises, and maintaining risk registers to track potential threats.
3. Business systems: The functionality and integrity of business systems are paramount to resilience. This encompasses conducting Line of Business Application (LOBA) reviews to ensure essential functions are safeguarded, implementing technical solutions to enhance resilience, and engaging in transformation initiatives to adapt to evolving threats.
4. Technical implementation: Technical implementation plays a crucial role in bolstering resilience measures, from establishing robust backup systems to safeguard data, creating disaster recovery (DR) environments to maintain operations during disruptions, and adopting cloud solutions for flexible and scalable infrastructure, to facilitating remote working capabilities for continuity.
5. Cyber considerations: Addressing cyber considerations is essential in modern resilience planning; establishing incident response protocols, including Security Operations Centre (SOC) strategies and planning, as well as managing risks within the supply chain and with external vendors.
6. Training and exercising: Training and exercising initiatives are vital for ensuring preparedness, conducting awareness and security training to educate employees, rehearsing business continuity plans through desktop exercises, and rigorously testing technical disaster recovery capabilities.
7. Governance: Frameworks provide structure and oversight for resilience efforts, including adhering to standards such as ISO27001 or ISO22301 for information security and business continuity, as well as conducting gap analyses and seeking accreditation to ensure compliance and effectiveness.

Especially during Business Continuity & Resilience Awareness Week (BCAW+R), we want to draw attention to the vital role of business continuity and resilience. The modern business landscape, marked by unpredictable events such as COVID-19, inflation and political unrest, underscores the necessity for robust planning, cybersecurity measures, and compliance with regulatory standards.

Business continuity and resilience must be comprehensive, integrating factors like cybersecurity and technology robustness, alongside practical steps such as business impact analysis and workshops to develop effective, resilient strategies tailored to organisational constraints and requirements.

If you want support in making the most of our scorecard, and simplify your journey to organisational resilience, from planning and development to governance and cybersecurity considerations, get in touch with our Head of Advisory Consulting, John Airey.