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Prepare for emerging threats in 2024: Strategies for enabling business continuity

Why prioritizing and investing in resilience matters 

Critical events such as severe weather, civil unrest, and cyber-attacks, have not only become more frequent over the past several years, but they have altered the way many organizations operate on a day-to-day basis. In addition to those events, add in the challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic and its clear these situations have the potential to directly affect the well-being of employees and operations, but is enough being done to mitigate or prevent their impact? While organizations cannot prevent critical events from occurring, they can be proactive with their decisions in order to reduce impact. With automated technology, organizations have a major asset toward identifying, responding to, and mitigating critical event damage, ensuring resilience amid a multitude of threats. 

What does it mean to be resilient?  

Resilience is defined as the capacity to withstand or to recover quickly from difficulties. When a company is resilient, it not only affects their financial stability, but their perception in the eyes of customers and prospects, as well as the morale of team members who play a role in helping the company avoid downfalls. The top performing organizations are not just visionaries, they execute on resilience goals and strategies.  

How often are critical events taking place? In IBM’s “Cost of a Data Breach Report 2022,” it was revealed that 83% of organizations have experienced at least one data breach. In addition, Forbes stated that in 2022, multiple records for extreme weather events were broken as climate change becomes more dramatic all over the world. With the unprecedented volume of critical events, it is vital for organizations to strengthen their resilience. 

Digitalization would pay off quickly for most organizations. Due to the extensive capabilities of automated critical event management solutions, there is a high degree of unrealized potential to improve resilience across organizations of all industries.  

How can organizations achieve resilience? 

Organizations can strengthen their resilience by implementing an early warning system to identify hyper-relevant risks to specific people, assets, or facilities anywhere in the world and alerting the appropriate first responders. IBM also reported that it takes an average of 197 days to identify and 69 days to contain a cyber security breach, but companies that contain a breach in less than 30 days save over $1 million when compared to those who took longer.   

Investing in a position such as a Chief Resilience Officer with a reasonable budget could be a great bridge between executives and the teams who are geared towards protecting employees and assets. Communicating the importance of security and resilience to board executives is a major step toward achieving improvement, especially by showing the impacts in terms of lost revenue or inability to generate revenue, as identified by the IBM study. 

Investing in resilience drives success, and a recent report commissioned by Everbridge and Atos and authored by Dr. Stefan Vieweg, Director of the Institute for Compliance and Corporate Governance (ICC) at the Rheinische Fachhochschule in Cologne, Germany, revealed that only half of decision makers felt even moderately prepared to be resilient amidst such threats. From that reports comes the Everbridge eBook The Research Behind Resilience: Why Prioritizing and Investing in Resilience Matters, where you can read why prioritizing and investing in resilience matters for companies of all sizes, and what can happen when organizations don’t do so. The eBook provides detailed data on the seven key resilience findings from the report, and the six most common characteristics of Europe’s highest-performing organizations.  

Investing in the right technology and automation can help to identify, respond to, and manage the effects of future critical events. Download our eBook The Research Behind Resilience: Why Prioritizing and Investing in Resilience Matters to learn more.  

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