How to build operational resilience in your organisation
Celerity Limited
Securely manage and transform your legacy environments within the datacentre and hybrid cloud.
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:
?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:
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.
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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:
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:
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:
Boost the operational resilience of your company.
The goal of operational resilience is to future-proof your company and lay the groundwork for long-term success. You run the risk of suffering costly business outages, significant financial losses, and harm to your company's reputation if you lack operational resilience.
Being operationally resilient will help you maintain compliance, protect your company from expensive downtime, and increase stakeholder and customer satisfaction and trust.
We are true experts in fostering operational resilience as a reputable IT managed service provider that offers professional cyber security managed services to businesses in the public and private sectors. Talk to us about how to keep your organisation and its data and systems secure, resilient, and recoverable.