Exploring Operational Resilience

The Operational Resilience application provides a complete view of your operational resilience status including the service details, entities, and the posture of the core areas of your business.

Operational Resilience overview The Operational Resilience application helps your organization to achieve a uniform vision and build resilience across different business functions. By using the Operational Resilience application on one platform, various teams can monitor the health of their services in one place as shown in the following example. Figure 1. Uniform vision with Operational Resilience

The Operational Resilience application helps different departments to build their operational resilience effectively: IT departments can automate their processes and track the availability and functioning of the failover systems of their applications. HR departments can have clear visibility on the market trends, resource pools, and retention risks. Facilities departments can focus on implementing the major improvements that help you to manage your day-to-day business operations with low maintenance. Security departments can address the physical vulnerabilities and cyberthreats efficiently. Finance teams can manage the contractual issues, supply chain risks, and overall finances effectively. Risk teams can analyze their potential risks and mitigate their service impact on the business operations.

Business Continuity Management and Operational Resilience Business Continuity Management implements an approach wherein it builds a plan to respond quickly to a disruption that may impact your entire organization. Operational Resilience defines the steps that an organization must proactively take to prevent any operational disruptions.

Business Continuity Management is about analyzing the business disruptions, preparing a disaster recovery plan, and responding to a crisis event at the business process level. Operational Resilience implements a holistic approach about providing a complete end-to-end service delivery. Operational Resilience is about proactively monitoring the resilience statistics and ensuring that the service delivery happens at any cost.

As stated earlier, Business Continuity Management operates at the business process level. On the other hand, Operational Resilience provides a clear understanding of your company's operational resilience statistics on the dashboard. It includes the statistics for Business Continuity Management , Vulnerability Response , and so on.

Operational Resilience workflow The Operational Resilience application provides a continuous four-stage workflow that helps your resilience managers and administrators to achieve your organization’s safety and well-being. You can prepare for and cope with the adverse events by anticipating, preventing, recovering from, and adapting to such events. The stages of operational resilience are shown in the following example.

Figure 2. Four stages of Operational Resilience workflow

To build resilience for your organization, analyze each stage in the resilience life cycle: Anticipate: When disastrous events happen, it is not always obvious which services, people, and processes are critical. Organizational silos, poor data, and different tools can impede your understanding of risks and cross-business dependencies. A lack of prioritization and planning can mean imprecise decision making.

To overcome these challenges, the Operational Resilience application helps you to perform a what-if scenario analysis to better plan for best, worst, and expected outcomes. The application helps you to prepare for what you must protect and identify the areas to prioritize, according to your business and risk context.

Prevent: Most operational procedures are designed for efficiency rather than for risk and compliance. Businesses often over-rely on the manual corrective controls, rather than the automated preventative controls. Early warning of risks or adverse events can be thwarted by manual processes and fragmented data. Such practices can cripple your response to disastrous events.

The Operational Resilience application can guide you through establishing sufficient controls that reduce the likelihood of potential problems in time to mitigate them effectively. With risk and compliance activities incorporated into your daily work, operations run smoothly with fewer efforts. Intelligent processes and policies help you unlock new efficiencies. Continuous monitoring triggers an immediate and targeted incident response.

Respond/Recover: Many businesses are organized in such a way that they are unable to respond to adverse events quickly or safely. Communication internally, or with vendors and suppliers is poor. Split-second decisions can worsen the situation, especially when information is incomplete or outdated.

Continuity plans, created using the Operational Resilience application, can help you prevent out-of-control escalation of an incident. A pre-approved and tested recovery plan prepares you to respond to the situations effectively, reduces the risks, and improves the recovery time.

Adapt: Operational resilience means you can quickly and easily bounce back from disasters. However, when these events occur, they are not often seen as learning opportunities. But they are. If you look at them in that way, you have a chance to improve your protective measures and respond effectively to the next event. Learning from these events and adapting can lead to minimized impacts and speedier recovery.

Adverse events, such as fire, extreme weather, pandemics, or data breaches, offer lessons about what could work better. The Operational Resilience application can help you collect data, assess results, and feed conclusions back to your teams. Visibility to the past provides business leaders with a vision of better operational performance in the future.

Operational Resilience benefits The Business Continuity Management application provides the following benefits:

Benefits Features Users Manage your Operational Resilience activities from the interactive dashboard in the Home page. Exploring the Home page Operational Resilience managers and users Monitor your individual and team tasks from a single dashboard in the My tasks view. Exploring the Tasks page and List page Operational Resilience managers and users Set up your business services in Operational Resilience workspace. Setting up your business services in Operational Resilience Workspace Operational Resilience managers and users Analyze the importance and impact tolerance of a business service. <a class="xref" href="../../grc-operational-res-ws/concept/analyze-impact-tolerance-importance-of-service-in-ws.html" title="By analyzing the importance and the impact tolerance of your business service, you can measure how possible disruptions might impact the performance of a service. You can use the assessment questionnaire template in Operational Resilience Workspace to measure the importance and the impact tolerance of your selected business service.">Analyzing the importance and impact tolerance of a business service in Operational Resilience Workspace Operational Resilience managers and users Perform a scenario analysis in Operational Resilience workspace. Performing a scenario analysis in Operational Resilience Workspace Operational Resilience managers and users Self-attest the business services in Operational Resilience workspace. <a class="xref" href="../../grc-operational-res-ws/concept/self-attestation-in-ws.html" title="If you have the sn_oper_res.manager role, you can certify the operational resilience status of your business services by completing the self-attestation process in Operational Resilience Workspace. You can complete the self-assessment questionnaire about the services, generate a self-attestation report, and upload the PDF so that you can have a copy of the report for your records.">Self-attesting the business services in Operational Resilience Workspace Operational Resilience managers and users Associate an issue in Operational Resilience workspace. Associating an issue in Operational Resilience Workspace Operational Resilience managers and users