The 6 Dimensions of a Winning Resilience Strategy

It’s become clear over the disruption of the past year that there are two ways of looking at resilience.

One is to think of it as preparing for the worst. Here, many of us understand that black swan events can, in theory, happen and that we need to put in place fall-back plans and mitigations to help their businesses survive temporary upheaval.

The other is much more powerful. In this mindset, we recognize that given the increasing complexity of the world, our interconnectedness and the increasing number of significant events -- from pandemics to climate change to social and political disruption -- we must build an enterprise that is resilient to the core. Our goal is to create an enterprise architecture that’s agile and adaptable by design, and able to ensure the business survives and thrives in the face of adversity.

Taking this view couldn’t be more important. We must increasingly realize we must prepare for the unexpected. In this view, resilience is no longer about risk mitigation, it’s about adaptability and effortlessly reacting to the next major disruption.

Building an Effective Strategy

We’ve identified six core dimensions of an effective resilience strategy. Many organizations will already be addressing some or all of these, but only the most successful will be taking a holistic view of all the dimensions and using this view to reimagine the enterprise operating model.

This approach delivers results because the various elements of resilience are not stand-alone functions. Rather, they interoperate with each other to protect the business and enable endless adaptability. An effective resilience strategy will allow you to:

• Manage extreme surges or drops in demand, navigate risk, deploy instant innovation, and optimize costs. Strategies should focus on creating cloud-native and multi-cloud environments to build redundancies and resilience into the architecture.
• Access your applications anywhere and on any device. That requires an application modernization strategy to migrate all enterprise applications to the cloud, and to leverage cloud resilience capabilities.
• Plan how to enable reliable, secure, and ubiquitous remote network connectivity for all workers. That requires reviewing and upgrading your network for maximum connectivity.
• Secure remote access from multiple sites while ensuring workers can still access what they need with ease. That requirement demands a Zero Trust model for multi-cloud solutions, individually owned devices, and third-party technologies. Identity access and multi-factor authentication can help secure access, while using cloud-native browser-based approaches can help make the user experience simple and fast.
• Leverage and access all types of data through all other components of the enterprise resilience strategy, focusing on data access and availability.
• Identify how best to deploy and scale the tools that team members need to get their jobs done and drive synergies across a connected workforce.

Wait, there’s more! You can read how best to implement these principles, as well as why they are necessary, by clicking on the full InformationWeek article here.