Operational Resilience Management

Operational Resilience Management is a strategic framework ensuring an organization can continue delivering its important business services during severe but plausible disruptions, such as cyberattacks or supplier failures. Originating from financial regulators like the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS), its goal is to enhance systemic stability. According to ISO 22316:2017, resilience is the ability to 'absorb and adapt in a changing environment.' Unlike traditional Business Continuity Management (BCM), which focuses on recovering internal processes, Operational Resilience focuses on external outcomes—maintaining services for customers within a pre-defined 'impact tolerance.' This requires a customer-centric view to identify critical services and ensure the supporting people, processes, technology, and third parties are sufficiently resilient.

Practical application of Operational Resilience Management involves several key steps: 1. **Identify Important Business Services**: Pinpoint services whose disruption would cause significant harm to customers or market stability. 2. **Set Impact Tolerances**: Quantify the maximum tolerable level of disruption for each service (e.g., maximum downtime, data loss). 3. **Map Dependencies**: Document all the people, processes, technology, and third-party vendors that support each important service. 4. **Conduct Scenario Testing**: Simulate severe but plausible scenarios (e.g., a key cloud provider outage) to test whether the organization can remain within its impact tolerances. For example, a global bank applied this by testing its payments service against a ransomware attack scenario, which helped identify vulnerabilities in its backup systems and reduce its projected recovery time by 40%, thereby improving its compliance posture.

Taiwanese enterprises often face three specific challenges: 1. **Resource and Expertise Constraints**: SMEs may lack the budget and interdisciplinary talent (IT, operations, risk) needed for complex dependency mapping and scenario testing. Solution: Adopt a phased approach, starting with the most critical business service, and leverage automated resilience management tools to reduce manual effort. 2. **Organizational Silos**: Effective resilience requires deep collaboration across departments, but traditional functional silos hinder communication and accountability. Solution: Establish a C-level sponsored, cross-functional steering committee to drive the initiative and embed resilience metrics into departmental performance goals. 3. **Lack of Supply Chain Transparency**: Gaining visibility into the resilience of critical third-party suppliers (and their suppliers) is difficult. Solution: Update third-party risk management policies to mandate that key suppliers provide their BCM plans and test results, making resilience a contractual requirement.

Winners Consulting specializes in Operational Resilience Management for Taiwan enterprises, delivering compliant management systems within 90 days. Free consultation: https://winners.com.tw/contact