BusinessResiliencyGift

Business resilience may not be the most dazzling gift you can give your customers this holiday season, but it is increasingly important for building and sustaining a successful operation.

There’s a scene near the end of the 1989 blockbuster Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade when Harrison Ford’s iconic character must select the Holy Grail from a room of golden chalices. Only one cup granted everlasting life to the person who sipped water from it; the rest delivered a far less desirable outcome, as Jones’ enemies discovered.

As the knight guarding the grail said of Jones, “He chose … wisely.”

Jones picked the one cup that was unlike all the rest. It wasn’t flashy. It didn’t dazzle. It bordered on boring, which made it easy for the untrained eye to overlook.

Your customers might think of business resilience in this way. Considering all that today’s technology has to offer—and the excitement it generates—business resilience by comparison may seem like receiving a knitted holiday sweater when the iPhone 6 is all you wanted.

Don’t be fooled.

Of course, the desire to invest in sexier products and services is understandable if you’re unsure why business resilience is a big deal. So, let’s start with an explanation that, like the cup Jones chose, is simple:

Business resilience, as defined by TechTarget.com, “is the ability an organization has to quickly adapt to disruptions while maintaining continuous business operations and safeguarding people, assets, and overall brand equity.”

Suddenly, the need for business resilience is much easier to grasp—or it should be. But if you’re not yet convinced of its importance, or executives need to be persuaded further, consider the following from the 2013-14 Global Business Continuity Management (BCM) Program Benchmarking Study. The joint report by Continuity Insights and KPMG says:

“Survey results indicated a significant increase in the number of organizations that experienced an incident or interruption in the past year that caused them to activate one or more business continuity plans, crisis management plans, or IT disaster recovery plans for:

  • “Weather-related incidents (59% vs. 50% in prior study)
  • “Power-related outage (52% vs. 47% in prior study)
  • “IT security (37% vs. 31% in prior study)”

It’s worth noting that continuity is a key component to achieving business resilience. The terms, however, are not synonymous. Nonetheless, it is a common misconception, as shown by the fact that 34% of respondents to a Continuity Central survey consider “organizational resilience” and “business continuity management” to be terms that mean the same thing.

Continuity keeps systems running smoothly when infrastructure is offline; it is a matter specific to IT operations. Resilience covers both IT and business operations, and offers organizations greater value.

“Organizational resilience is much more than recovery from disaster or serious incidents,” wrote Lyndon Bird, the technical director for the Business Continuity Institute. “It is the ability to identify and monitor risks to prevent them from happening in the first place, or at least (minimize) the impact. It is about the capability of the organization to deal with incidents that cannot possibly be predicted or adapt itself to changes in its external circumstances such as civil war in a key supplier country.”

He went on to say creating “relevant approaches to deal with issues that do not fit the old BCM model of physical disruption to assets is a real challenge: cyber resiliency must be high on our agenda …”

This holiday season, choose substance over style and give your customers the gift of business resilience.

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Claire Fleming is a marketing professional with more than ten years of Channel experience. Fluent in French, she is currently running a global marketing team for MAX Backup, the standalone Backup product in the MAXfocus family.

Claire Fleming
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