Operational resilience is the ability of an organization to deliver critical business operations, even during disruptions. This concept, as defined by the European Banking Authority, emphasizes ensuring that essential services continue to function amid challenges such as cyber-attacks, natural disasters, regulatory changes, or supply chain disruptions. 

Unlike organizational resilience, which focuses on the broader capacity of an organization to adapt and survive, operational resilience focuses on maintaining critical operations. Its growing importance stems from the increasingly interconnected and complex environments businesses operate in today. 

Why operational resilience matters 

Disruption is an unavoidable reality in today’s business environment. With increasingly sophisticated cyber threats, geopolitical uncertainties, natural disasters and a hyperconnected digital world, the question is no longer if a critical incident will occur, but when. The ability to anticipate and mitigate such incidents can mean the difference between navigating the storm successfully or facing significant losses.  

Beyond financial impacts, failing to maintain operations during a crisis can severely harm your reputation and strain relationships with customers and vendors. In some industries, it could even lead to regulatory penalties. Being prepared is not just an advantage—it’s a necessity. 

For industries such as Financial Services, Healthcare, Energy and Utilities, Telecom, and Manufacturing, disruptions can have far-reaching effects. Operational resilience ensures: 

• Business continuity even under adverse circumstances. 
• Protection of critical services for customers and stakeholders.  
• Regulatory compliance, reducing the risk of penalties.  
• Enhanced organizational reputation, fostering trust and loyalty.  

Ultimately, operational resilience sets businesses up not only to survive but to thrive, ensuring they remain competitive no matter the challenges. 

Key elements of operational resilience 

Building operational resilience requires focusing on three critical areas: people, processes, and technology.  

People 

• Cross-functional collaboration: Teams from IT, security, leadership, compliance, and operations must work together to identify potential vulnerabilities and develop strategies. 
• Leadership is key: Leaders must foster a culture of resilience that encourages proactive problem-solving and organizational readiness. 

Processes  

• Protect critical business functions: Identify which processes are vital to operations and design safeguards to keep them running. 
• Flexibility is critical: Operational workflows must be adaptable to accommodate unforeseen challenges or evolving risks. 

Technology & systems   

• Robust IT infrastructure is essential: This includes cybersecurity measures, disaster recovery plans, and reliable data backup systems.  
• Modern tools pave the way for real-time insights: Technologies like artificial intelligence can help monitor vulnerabilities and predict potential disruptions. 

How to build operational resilience  

Implementing operational resilience starts with actionable steps that organizations can take today.  

Assessing operational risks & vulnerabilities  

• Conduct comprehensive risk assessments to identify potential threats.  
• Map out dependencies across operations, including third-party vendors and supply chains.   

Establishing a response framework   

• Develop incident response plans that outline clear steps to handle unforeseen disruptions.  
• Regularly test frameworks through drills and simulations, ensuring readiness during high-stress events.  

Embedding resilience into strategic decisions  

• Align operational resilience with business goals, risk management strategies, and business continuity planning.  
• Make continuous adaptation a priority, recognizing that risks and operational landscapes constantly evolve.  

Continuous improvement  

• Track performance over time using KPIs specific to resilience and refine strategies accordingly.  
• Stay informed about emerging risks and industry changes that may require new approaches.  

Operational Resilience vs Business Continuity  

While operational resilience and business continuity often overlap, they are distinct approaches.  

Operational resilience takes a proactive and broader approach. It considers not just internal operations but external dependencies, regulatory requirements (like DORA in financial services), and long-term risks.  

Business continuity, on the other hand, focuses on reactive measures, such as predefined plans to recover quickly after disruptions. Its priority is minimizing downtime and restoring operations.  

Both disciplines depend on cross-functional collaboration, emphasize the identification of critical business functions, and require regular testing. However, operational resilience builds on business continuity by ensuring adaptability to future challenges.  

Future of operational resilience 

The future of operational resilience is rooted in proactive planning and continuous improvement. To remain competitive, businesses must anticipate risks and integrate resilience into their everyday strategies.  

This means fostering collaboration across departments, leveraging advanced technologies, and aligning resilience with organizational goals. By combining operational resilience with business continuity, organizations position themselves to withstand turbulent conditions and meet future challenges head-on.  

Now is the time to act. Continuity experts should assess their organization’s operational resilience framework, identify gaps, and take strategic steps to strengthen it.

For more ways to operationalize resilience, visit our resource on understanding DORA and explore our Operational Resilience Solutions.  

Operational resilience isn’t just a priority—it’s a business imperative. Take the next step to protect your critical operations today. 

Join us for Discover Resilience 2025, a three-day user conference bringing together the Everbridge and Infinite Blue communities at the Margaritaville Resort in Orlando, May 4-6.

In December 2024 a prominent CEO was shot and killed outside of a Manhattan hotel where they were attending an investor meeting. The incident has drawn significant public attention, with speculation surrounding both the suspect’s motives and the broader implications for corporate security, given ongoing controversies and protests against the company at the time of the attack.

The best way to protect your company and your executive assets from this risk is developing a comprehensive executive protection and secure journey management plan.An intelligence led approach can limit your risk exposure and enhance your executive protection in a variety of ways.

– Adam DeLuca, Everbridge Director of Risk Intelligence

Monitoring

Early detection of threat and risk is invaluable to executive protection. Monitoring collection platforms in real-time allows you to identify potential threats before they become major problems and enables executive protection teams to proactively manage risk to their clients in a timely manner.

Utilizing different types of intelligence  

OSINT gathers information from publicly available sources. Human intelligence collects information obtained through direct contact with individuals who may have relevant insights. Signal intelligence monitors electronic communications and data to identify potential threats. Protective intelligence focuses specifically on identifying and assessing threats to an individual. These types of intelligence analyze incredible amounts of data from various sources to provide a comprehensive picture of the threat landscape to help shape risk assessments. 

Trend analysis / Threat assessments

Looking at the threat landscape and doing comprehensive threat assessments allows security teams to anticipate potential risks and vulnerabilities, develop targeted mitigation strategies, and make informed decisions to safeguard the principal through detailed situational awareness, rather than simply reacting to incidents.

Situational awareness

By monitoring real-time information, intelligence provides a comprehensive understanding of the environment surrounding the executive, including potential dangers in specific locations or during travel.

“Are you doing everything you should be doing to build organizational resilience?” Plans, projects, and technologies may occupy most of your time, but it’s worth taking a step back to reflect on how your resilience-focused activities may be aligned…or misaligned. Building organizational resilience requires having optimal plans, strategies, tools, and processes.

The newly released standard to help organizations build resilience–ISO 22336–is the first international standard that provides comprehensive guidelines for designing, implementing, and improving resilience policies and strategies within organizations. This standard offers a blueprint to enhance resilience, optimize risk management, and refine strategic planning. It also complements and works in tandem with other standards that focus on risk management, business continuity management, and crisis management, like ISO 31000, ISO 22301, and ISO 22361.

Most organizations are doing things to become more resilient, but programs and initiatives are often segmented. With ISO 22336, executives and managers now have clear guidance on how to drive their organization to become more resilient. Perhaps the most helpful thing about this standard is that it helps organizations identify what they aren’t doing, but should be.

What is ISO 22336:2024? 

ISO 22336 is specifically for organizations seeking to improve their resilience capabilities. It focuses on formulating policy, designing strategy, and determining priorities to implement an organization’s resilience strategy effectively. 

Key points include: 

• Designing and formulating a resilience policy. 
• Creating strategies to achieve resilience objectives. 
• Determining priorities for implementing resilience initiatives. 
• Establishing cooperative and coordinated capabilities to enhance resilience. 

This standard is applicable to any organization, regardless of industry or sector, and aims to enhance its resilience throughout its lifecycle.  

What are the benefits of implementing the new ISO? 

• Enhanced resilience: ISO 22336:2024 equips organizations with the framework and tools to build robust resilience processes. This ensures that businesses can withstand and recover from disruptions, maintaining operational continuity and safeguarding stakeholder interests. 
• Improved risk management: The standard emphasizes a proactive approach to risk management. By understanding and anticipating potential threats, organizations can implement measures to mitigate risks before they escalate into crises. 
• Strategic planning: ISO 22336:2024 encourages integrating resilience into strategic planning. This alignment ensures that resilience is not an afterthought but a core component of organizational strategy, enabling businesses to adapt to changing environments effectively. It enables improved oversight on establishing KPIs and objectives that can be evaluated to understand the benefit of resilience and the investment towards organizational resilience. It can also provide a comprehensive framework for resilience ensuring all avenues of resilience (e.g. risk, continuity, disaster recovery, third-party risk management) are all working collaboratively and are minimizing gaps. 

Real-world applications: bridging theory and practice 

For organizations that apply the ISO 22336:2024 standard, the benefits can lead to tangible improvements in resilience and organizational performance. Consider the following examples:  

Example 1: Integrated  

Sections 6.4.4 and 7.4 of the standard state that organizations should eliminate silos and be integrated, which includes integrating systems, teams, and budgets. One example is having a critical event management (CEM) platform that is used across several teams, and integrated with other systems and sources, like risk intelligence feeds, Human Resource Information Systems, badging systems, and travel management systems. These integrations allow organizations to detect risks to employees and operations, and quickly respond to critical events. 

Example 2: Prepared  

Section 7.6 of the standard states that organizations should demonstrate preparedness by investing in capabilities to anticipate and respond to changing circumstances, and demonstrate resourcefulness by anticipating future conditions, and mobilizing and coordinating wider human, financial, and physical resources. Organizations can bolster their critical event planning by using business continuity software such as the Everbridge Business Continuity in the Cloud (BCIC) platform. BCIC is used by several Fourtune 10 companies and helps organizations assess potential business impacts, identify interdependencies, and develop plans to prepare for all types of threats and hazards.   Organizations can also benefit from integrating business continuity software with a critical event management platform, such as Everbridge 360^TM. By using both organizations are able to plan, anticipate, mitigate, respond to, and recover from critical events. 

Example 3: Continual improvement and evaluation  

Section 8.6 of the standard states that organizations should evaluate performance against its purpose, plans and indicators, and expected behaviors. The BCIC platform facilitates this by enabling organizations to store, manage, and update plans, as well as identify progress and performance against the plans.

A strategic imperative for resilience 

Although complying with  ISO 22336:2024 isn’t a legal requirement, doing so can help organizations gain a competitive edge in today’s complex business landscape. By embedding resilience into every facet of their operations, organizations can transform challenges into opportunities, ensuring stability and continuity no matter what the future holds. As the landscape of risk evolves, so must our strategies—ISO 22336:2024 is the key to unlocking a resilient future. 

How resilient is your organization? Complete the Best in Resilience Maturity Self-Assessment to see how you measure up against over 800 global organizations.  

Our comprehensive risk management services are designed to enable businesses to operate safe in the knowledge that everything possible is being done to ensure their people and other assets are protected. We combine deep security expertise with innovative technology to help you deliver the policies, training, protection and responses needed – no matter what.