Business Resilience

Today’s business environment is becoming increasingly complex and ambiguous. Our growing reliance upon technology and cloud-based applications brings great benefits and has helped to reduce risks in relation to business continuity. Where once, business continuity focused heavily on recovering systems and data, software as a service (SAAS) means that systems and data can be available at all times from any location.

Business resilience builds on the principles of business continuity but extends further to help create organisational immunity against challenges, disruptions, attacks and a range of risk events.

Creating organisational resilience should be part of the board’s risk management oversight and a key focus for senior leaders. Countless businesses have been brought to their knees by a lack of foresight or poor crisis management.

These events highlight the shortcomings of traditional risk management and lack of capabilities, tools and approach in organisations needed to be resilient.

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From continuity to resilience in a digital world

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Business continuity traditionally focused on how an organisation recovered from a business interruption arising from a risk event.

Just as nature seeks out opportunities to grow and survive, businesses too need to be focusing on surviving in the face of challenges and uncertainty. The focus should move from how to recover, to how to avoid disruptions in the first instance.

Business resilience is the embedding of strategy, capabilities, processes, behaviours and systems which allows an organisation to continue to carry out its mission, in the face of disruption regardless of its source.


Our approach to successfully embedding business resilience focuses on five key disciplines:

Strategy, Governance, People, Communications, Operations

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Resilience requires a holistic, coordinated and committed approach

While there is no single strategy or solution to achieve business resilience, organisations can enhance it by strengthening individual management disciplines to enable risk to be anticipated, understood and managed in an integrated and coordinated manner. It also involves building an organisational culture that ensures behaviours are directed towards continuous improvement, adaptability, change management and sustainability.

It is also critically important that an organisation has effective and empowered leaders who are trusted, respected, who understand risk and who can, and do, make decisions.

Next steps…

We see more organisations increasing their investment in proactive, rather than reactive, disciplines to anticipate, prevent, protect and plan for recovery.

i3 Australia has assisted a significant number of clients move from business continuity to business resilience.


Talk to us about how we can apply our approach and experience to help with a variety of complex business resilience challenges, including supporting your response to regulatory reviews and remediation activities.

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