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Organizational vs. operational resilience
Organizational and operational resilience are two critical components of BCDR. Learn the differences between the two and how to establish them for peak resilience.
Resilience is a prominent element of business continuity and disaster recovery. Organizational and operational resilience are two facets of this area that businesses must understand and implement to achieve business resilience.
Business resilience ensures that an organization can recover after a crisis, resume operations and withstand future threats. Along with protecting an organization, achieving organizational and operational resilience can also benefit a company's image.
A reputation for resilience can greatly enhance an organization's survival over time, since it is more likely to get through disruptions. Organizations that are perceived as being able to stay operational despite disruptive events are likely to be more in-demand, well positioned and highly competitive within their marketplaces.
You cannot achieve operational and organizational resilience if you don't understand the differences between them. This article will compare organizational vs. operational resilience, how to achieve each metric, and why they matter to an overall business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) strategy.
What is organizational resilience?
Organizational resilience generally embodies the entire organization, including technology, people, facilities, processes and everything needed to operate the business. If each of these elements is protected from disruptive events, and plans are in place to recover and restore them to normal operations, you could say organizational resilience has been achieved.
Adaptability is also a part of most organizational resilience definitions. Ideally, a resilient organization can bend and flex during a disruptive event and return to normal operations once the event has passed.
The International Organization for Standardization has a standard on organizational resilience, ISO 22316:2017, Security and resilience -- Organizational resilience -- Principles and attributes. This standard defines a framework for organizations to make sure that their business activities can be protected and maintained now and in the future. A key element of the standard is the focus on preparing organizations to better anticipate and respond to potential risks and threats, while also identifying and mitigating vulnerabilities.
What is operational resilience?
Operational resilience has been in the shadows of organizational resilience and is now a term of growing interest. Gartner describes operational resilience as "initiatives that expand business continuity management programs to focus on the impacts, connected risk appetite and tolerance levels for disruption of product or service delivery to internal and external stakeholders."
While organizational resilience focuses on the long term, operational resilience focuses on immediate action. Operational resilience is directly linked to business continuity because both prioritize getting systems and processes up and running as soon as possible.
| Organizational resilience | Operational resilience | |
| Scope | Organization-wide. | Business operations and processes. |
| Time frame | Long-term strategic focus. | Immediate to medium-term focus. |
| Primary focus | Overall adaptability and resilience. | Continuity of critical business functions. |
| Key components | Culture, leadership, strategy. | Systems, processes, technology. |
| How it is measured | Strategic outcomes, organizational health. | Operational KPIs, recovery time objectives. |
| Who is responsible | Board and executive leadership. | Operations and technology teams. |
How to establish organizational resilience
As the name implies, organizational resilience looks at the entire organization. BCDR, cybersecurity and supply chain initiatives are all essential building blocks for achieving organizational resilience. Ideally, each of these initiatives works with the others to minimize the likelihood of disruptive events occurring and to maximize the security and survivability of each element.
Since organizational resilience involves the entire company, establishing it requires commitment from leadership as well as cultural transformation, promoting resilience and long-term adaptability. To achieve organizational resilience, it must be part of the company's strategic planning for the future.
How to establish operational resilience
Operational resilience examines a business's activities and what it requires to continue performing those activities. It is more process-oriented than organizational resilience, examining how the business functions and what the organization needs to protect those processes.
What do businesses need to operate today? Despite its focus on workers and processes, the push for operational resilience must start at the top. Senior management must be aware of the importance of maintaining operational resilience and must support initiatives such as the creation of policies, frameworks and structures that support it. These then filter down to operational teams to implement programs, controls and procedures to produce products and services.
Paul Kirvan, FBCI, CISA, is an independent consultant and technical writer with more than 35 years of experience in business continuity, disaster recovery, resilience, cybersecurity, GRC, telecom and technical writing.
