How to Build Business Resilience: A Comprehensive Guide for Today’s Enterprises

While many IT pros may think of business resilience as primarily about data, hardware, server disaster recovery, and business continuity, it’s important to broaden this perception to include all strategies that help you avoid costly downtime, reduce vulnerabilities, and keep your operations rolling. 

That means you must be ready for unexpected ransomware attacks, data breaches, hardware failures, natural disasters—or any other type—whenever it strikes. The costs of being unprepared are high: The IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report 2023 found that the average data breach cost in 2023 was $4.45 million. With that in mind, here is a list of strategies and tactics you need to address to ensure your business is resilient.

Understanding Business Continuity Planning

TechTarget defines business resilience as “the ability of an organization to quickly adapt to disruptions while maintaining continuous business operations and safeguarding people, assets, and overall brand equity.” Essentially, business resilience comprises your strategies and tactics to ensure you can quickly recover from disruptions and that critical business functions continue during and after significant adverse events.

Strategic risk management integrates resilience into your business strategy. It includes employing comprehensive risk assessments to identify every possible potential threat. It also requires a proactive approach that leverages predictive analytics to identify and mitigate potential impacts.

Business impact analysis (BIA) is a critical evaluation that helps you understand the potential real-world impacts on your business operations, guides the prioritization of vital functions, and allocates resources to ensure business continuity.

Building a business continuity plan covers a lot of ground, so let’s examine each area of resilience and the steps you should take to ensure your business is resilient.

Physical Locations and Facilities Resilience

Threats
Your buildings and physical infrastructure are vulnerable to natural disasters like floods, fires, earthquakes, and other natural and human-caused disasters. 

Mitigation Tactics
Invest in infrastructure resilience, such as retrofitting buildings to resist natural disasters, implementing fire suppression systems, and employing backup power supplies like generators and renewable energy resources.

Employee Resilience Training

Threats 
Employees’ resilience is tested by disaster, but they can also be the cause. Phishing, insider attacks, and inadequate access controls can lead to ransomware, data breaches, and worse.

Mitigation Tactics
Establish employee training and support programs that enhance employee resilience by equipping them with the skills to spot malicious attacks, respond appropriately, and handle disruptions effectively. 

Regular training on emergency procedures and resilience-building workshops are a step in the right direction. Testing the effectiveness of these programs is essential. It’s also worth considering flexible work policies that enable remote work if access to a physical location is restricted.

Cybersecurity Resilience

Threats
Cyberattacks can disrupt your business operations and, as noted, be incredibly costly in terms of dollars and reputational damage. 

Mitigation Tactics
Implement a multilayered data protection strategy by adopting solutions like the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework. Version 2.0 of this framework was recently released, offering a structured and measurable approach to securing your IT systems and data. 

Conduct regular security audits and penetration tests to assess the effectiveness of your current security measures and identify vulnerabilities in your systems—before they can be exploited.

Data Resilience

Threats
Data breaches, loss, or corruption due to hardware failure, software flaws, or cyberattacks can cripple your operations.

Mitigation Tactics
Deploy robust backup and disaster recovery solutions, including automating backups following the 3-2-1-1 strategy, with copies stored offsite and in immutable storage. This ensures redundancy so your data can be recovered in the event of a data loss incident.

Create (or update) your disaster recovery plan and ensure it is comprehensive. This includes outlining each step you’ll take to recover your data and restore your systems and establishing your recovery time and point objectives (RTOs/RPOs).

Cloud data protection, such as Arcserve Unified Data Protection (UDP) software, should be included. This powerful software solution prevents cyberattacks across on- and off-premises workloads—local, virtual, or cloud—and orchestrates recovery. Arcserve UDP neutralizes ransomware attacks with Sophos Intercept X Advanced cybersecurity and ensures complete IT resiliency for your virtual, physical, and cloud infrastructure.

Schedule a Demo

Check out Arcserve UDP and see how it ensures data resilience by requesting a demo. 

Choose an Arcserve technology partner for expert help with your data resilience, backup, and disaster recovery efforts.