Operational Resilience: Definition, Importance, and Implementation

What Is Operational Resilience?

In short, it’s all about business durability. It is an organization’s ability to anticipate, prepare for, respond to, and adapt to unexpected disruptions. Whether from cyberattacks, natural disasters, system failures, a pandemic like Covid, or third-party risks, it’s all about continuing to deliver critical business functions. Rather than simply reacting to incidents, this kind of durability involves proactively identifying risk and embedding agility across people, processes, and technology.

It extends beyond traditional risk management by focusing not only on preventing interruptions but also on maintaining critical operations and recovering quickly when they occur. It is increasingly prioritized across sectors such as finance, healthcare, government, and manufacturing, where even short downtimes can result in major consequences.

Why Does It Matter?

In today’s hyperconnected world, disruption is inevitable. According to The Business Continuity Institute’s 2024 Horizon Scan Report, 76% of organizations experienced at least one significant disruption over the past year, and 62% of respondents now consider this kind of business durability a board-level priority.[i]

More than 40% of business and technology leaders identify economic uncertainty as their top systemic concern, according to Forrester.[ii] In the financial sector, the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the Bank of England mandated that firms meet specific resilience requirements for the financial system by March 31, 2025.[iii] Similarly, the EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) sets rigorous standards for incident response and continuity across financial entities. In addition, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) published Prudential Standard, CPS 230 Operational Risk Management—which goes into effect July 1, 2025—addressing risks, durability, and continuity.[iv]

While volatility cannot be avoided, it can be managed with a proactive and holistic risk approach. Forrester recommends planning for three types of risk:

• Enterprise risk: Internal risks tied to strategy and operations, within the organization’s direct control.
• Ecosystem risk: Risks from third-party vendors and supply chains, which can be partially controlled.
• External risk: Uncontrollable factors such as geopolitical events, economic changes, or natural disasters.

The organizations that thrive are those that build durability into their operations. It helps protect revenue, reputation, compliance standing, and customer trust by ensuring continuity when interruptions strike. In short, it enables organizations to withstand shocks, minimize losses, and maintain confidence across customers, regulators, and partners.

How Does It Work?

It’s not a single process or tool. Rather, it is a coordinated effort that touches all aspects of a business. Here’s how it typically works:

1. Identify critical business services. Organizations determine which services are essential to customers and the economy, and which processes, systems, people, and suppliers support those services.
2. Map dependencies and prioritize risks. This includes identifying upstream and downstream dependencies, such as third-party service providers, supply chain elements, data centers, and IT infrastructure. Next, organizations assess and prioritize risks based on factors like likelihood of occurrence, potential impact, and time to recover. A structured risk matrix can help quantify and visualize these priorities, guiding investment in mitigation strategies and ensuring focus on the most significant threats.
3. Set impact tolerances. Define the maximum acceptable level of disorder for each crucial business service. This could involve limits on downtime, financial loss, or reputational impact.
4. Conduct scenario testing and stress exercises. Scenario-based planning is essential to build adaptive response strategies. Regularly simulate unplanned, chaotic scenarios to test preparedness and measure durability. These tests help uncover gaps in response capabilities and inform risk mitigation plans.
5. Implement controls and remediation plans. Apply technical, organizational, and procedural controls to reduce the likelihood and impact of interruptions. This may include recovery plans, backup systems, and workforce readiness.
6. Monitor, report, and adapt. Continuously monitor for changes in risk exposure, incident response performance, and regulatory compliance. Adjust strategies as business conditions and threat landscapes evolve.

How Does It Relate to Cyber Resilience?

Operational resilience and cyber resilience are closely intertwined but not identical. Cyber resilience focuses on an organization’s ability to prepare for, respond to, and recover from attacks and other cybersecurity incidents. It is a key pillar within the broader scope with a goal of maintaining essential functions even in the face of compromised systems or persistent threats.

Operational resilience, meanwhile, encompasses not only cyber risks but also physical, environmental, and human-related issues. For example:

• A ransomware attack that encrypts customer data is a cyber resilience issue.
• The business’s ability to continue serving customers despite that ransomware attack is an operational resilience challenge.

In practice, both domains must work together. Cyber resilience provides the technical foundation to detect, respond to, and contain threats. Operational durability ensures those capabilities are aligned with business priorities and embedded in a broader continuity strategy.

How Does It Relate to Continuous Threat Exposure Management?

Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) is a proactive, iterative security approach that continuously identifies, prioritizes, validates, and remediates the most pressing risks to an organization. CTEM is closely aligned, as both prioritize anticipating threats, minimizing impact, and maintaining continuity.

CTEM enhances durability by offering real-time visibility into an organization’s evolving threat landscape. It ensures that the most important exposures, such as unpatched vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, or attack paths, are continuously surfaced and addressed before they can disrupt operations. By integrating CTEM into the broader durability strategy, organizations can move from reactive incident handling to proactive resilience engineering, ensuring their systems and teams remain agile in the face of emerging threats.

Who Is Responsible?

It is an enterprise-wide responsibility. While executive leadership drives the strategy and allocates resources, success requires collaboration across departments.

Key roles include:

• Board and executive leadership: Set the risk appetite, oversee program maturity, and ensure accountability.
• Chief Risk Officer (CRO): Owns the overall risk management framework, including operational risk and impact tolerances.
• Chief Information Security Officer (CISO): Ensures security and resilience practices support continuity.
• Business unit leaders: Identify crucial services and lead the design of continuity strategies for their functions.
• IT and infrastructure teams: Maintain technical durability through redundancy, backups, and high availability.
• Third-party risk managers: Evaluate and manage the resilience of external service providers.
• Compliance and legal: Ensure alignment with regulatory requirements and manage disclosure obligations during incidents.
• Ultimately, it must be integrated into strategic planning, risk management, and day-to-day operations.

Common Approaches and Solutions

Organizations typically adopt a combination of frameworks, technologies, and governance practices. Common solutions include:

• BCM platforms that centralize response plans, impact analyses, and testing
• Disaster Recovery (DR) infrastructure, such as cloud backups and failover system
• Risk management platforms that map essential services to operational and technology risks
• IT asset and dependency mapping tools to understand what systems support what services
• Third-Party Risk Management (TPRM) programs to evaluate and monitor external dependencies and usually include risk assessments
• Security operations platforms that detect and respond to threats affecting business operations – and provide analytics
• Risk management and governance frameworks (e.g., ISO 22301, NIST) – ISO 22301 is an international standard for Business Continuity Management Systems (BCMS) that outlines best practices for business continuity planning, establishing, and improving resilience capabilities.[v] It provides a structured approach to ensuring that organizations can maintain critical operations during and after an interruption.

These capabilities are often integrated into larger governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) programs.

Common Challenges

While most organizations understand its importance, execution can be complex. Common challenges include:

• Siloed functions: It requires coordination across IT, risk, compliance, cybersecurity, and business units. When these functions operate in silos, strategies can become fragmented, leading to inconsistent response plans and duplicated efforts.
• Lack of real-time visibility: Without timely visibility into systems and assets, organizations cannot quickly detect issues or understand their cascading effects. This slows down incident response and makes it difficult to assess the true impact on crucial services.
• Underestimating dependencies: Many organizations lack awareness about the deeply interconnected nature of their systems and third-party services. This leads to overlooked risk and single points of failure, especially when essential dependencies aren’t documented or monitored.
• Compliance-only mindsets: Some businesses treat these programs as a means to satisfy regulations rather than to drive meaningful preparedness. This checkbox mentality can leave organizations unprepared when a real issue occurs.
• Infrequent testing: Regular scenario testing is essential to validate durability strategies. Organizations that rarely test their plans may be unaware of gaps, unassigned responsibilities, or technical issues that could derail recovery efforts during an actual crisis.
• Inconsistent measurement: Operational risk is difficult to quantify. Common metrics include recovery time objective (RTO), recovery point objective (RPO), financial loss estimates, and regulatory penalties. However, many organizations lack standardized risk measurement frameworks.
• Evolving threat landscape: From ransomware to climate-related issues, the speed and variety of emerging threats make it difficult to keep these strategies current. Without continual reassessment, organizations may be preparing for yesterday’s risks.

Best Practices for Operational Resilience

• Identify key risk sources: Start by pinpointing risk categories, such as internal process failures, human errors, system outages, cyber incidents, or external events, and assessing their likelihood and potential impact.
• Use risk scoring models: Quantify risks using scoring models that incorporate factors like frequency, severity, and business necessity. Risk heat maps and CVSS scores (for cyber risks) can help visualize priorities.
• Build cross-functional teams: Foster collaboration among IT, risk, security, operations, and business leaders to develop a unified durability.
• Simulate realistic scenarios: Run tabletop and technical exercises to stress-test systems and processes. Use findings to refine playbooks, improve communication, and close readiness gaps.
• Continuously monitor threats: Use threat intelligence feeds, vulnerability scanning, and performance monitoring to detect potential issues early and adjust response plans accordingly.
• Ensure regulatory alignment: Align durability efforts with relevant industry regulations (e.g., DORA in the EU, FFIEC in the U.S.) to avoid penalties and meet stakeholder expectations.
• Foster a culture of resilience: Educate staff on their roles in maintaining operational continuity and reward behaviors that support preparedness. When resilience is part of the culture, response becomes second nature and less reliant on formal processes alone.

How Forescout Supports

With Forescout, organizations can reduce operational risk, detect and isolate issues before they escalate, and maintain continuity of crucial business services even under adverse conditions.

• Forescout 4D Platform^TM: Enables unified visibility and asset intelligence across hybrid environments.
• Risk and Exposure Management: Identifies risk across flaws in software, hardware, and misconfigurations—including monitoring and mitigating risk exposure from vendors, contractors, and supply chains—while prioritizing based on business risk, and orchestrates remediation.
• Continuity and Incident Response: Enables faster response to threats and maintains operational continuity.
• OT Security and IoT Security: Protects critical infrastructure by segmenting networks and detecting and remediating cyber threats before they lead to operational incidents.

Learn more about our OT security solutions and the Forescout 4D Platform™.

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[i] The Business Continuity Institute. BCI Horizon Scan Report 2024. November 13, 2024
[ii]   Forrester. Forrester: To Thrive Amid Volatility, Leaders Must Optimize Technology Investments, Excel At Driving Change, And Proactively Manage Risk. April 10, 2025 
[iii]  Financial Conduct Authority. Operational resilience: insights and observations for firms. Last updated: 28/05/2024
[iv] ARPA. Prudential Standard CPS 230 Operational Risk Management. July 2025
[v]  ISO. ISO 22301 – Business continuity. 2019