As cyber-attacks continue to significantly impact business operations, whether targeting the organization or their supply chain, amid a turbulent geopolitical climate, it’s clear that business resilience is now a crucial necessity for organizations of all sizes.
According to a 2023 report from PwC, 96% of organizations had experienced business disruption in the previous two years. Further, 76% said their most significant crisis had a medium-to-high impact on operations, resulting in disruption to critical business processes and services.
For modern businesses, their data is both the target for business disruption and the wellspring of business operations. You cannot protect what you cannot see. That’s why data discovery and proactive data management is the cornerstone of business resilience.
Defining business resilience
Business resilience is the ability of an organization to overcome unexpected business disruption and recover to acceptable continuing operations. It goes beyond incident response and disaster recovery, and reflects the agility businesses need to continue functioning amid any change to the environment in which they operate.
It can be broken down into three core components:
- Strategic – the top-level ability to evolve and adapt to constant change
- Operational – the ability to continue critical operations in adverse conditions
- Financial – maintaining capital and cash flow throughout a crisis
Guiding principles of business resilience
The BCI Resilience Framework defines seven guiding principles that map broadly across business continuity and operational resilience standards and regulations.
These principles form a cyclical, continuous process to deliver agile and resilient business operations:
- Leadership led – Effective business resilience, adaptability and response must be driven from the top, establishing resilience as a strategic priority and assigning roles, responsibility and accountability at the leadership level.
- Clear direction – Clear guidance that is maintained and updated in response to organizational changes must be given, that establishes the purpose, objectives and outcomes for business resilience.
- Current state – Business resilience can only be achieved from a clear, comprehensive understanding of the current state of the organization — specifically, its data and system assets, processes, people and supply chain — as a starting point for the additional steps required to achieve desired resilience outcomes.
- Risk-based – Building on the current state of the business, this step focuses on risk and exposures that pose a threat to the organization and defines the priorities for resilience decision-making.
- Collaborative – Resilience cannot be gained in siloed isolation. It must be coherent and collaborative across the organization and its key stakeholders and suppliers.
- Defined solutions – Resilience strategies and solutions must be created tailored to the needs of the organization and its resilience goals.
Adaptable – Any resilience strategy must be flexible and adaptable to changing circumstances, including how the organization must transform in response to an incident, natural disaster or global event.
Business resilience in standards, laws and regulation
In response to growing threats, governments and regulators have introduced laws and regulations requiring operational resilience programs for critical infrastructure and high-risk sectors.
For example, in the EU, the NIS2 Directive mandates cybersecurity and operational resilience for essential services including energy, transportation, healthcare, finance and digital infrastructure.
Also in the EU, the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) requires financial institutions and their technology providers to implement robust digital resilience strategies.
In the UK, the Financial Conduct Authority requires financial institutions and financial services providers to meet operational resilience requirements defined in the FCA Handbook, SYSC 15A.2 Operational resilience requirements.
Meanwhile, in Australia, APRA standards CPS 230 Operational Risk Management and CPS 232 Business Continuity include resilience requirements for regulated entities.
While there is no obligation for organizations outside of these sectors to implement resilience practices, there are business resilience standards and frameworks organizations can adopt to inform their resilience strategy, including ISO 22316:2017 Security and resilience — Principles and attributes, and ISO 22336:2024 Security and resilience — Guidelines for resilience policy and strategy.
These standards and regulations emphasize the need for visibility, control and governance of sensitive data and critical assets.
The role of data in business resilience
Data is the heart of modern businesses, driving efficiency and innovation, informing decision making and enhancing customer experiences. Organizations ingest and process vast amounts of data every day, across fragmented, decentralized systems. Meanwhile, data management weaknesses can leave organizations vulnerable and exposed.
To be resilient, organizations must first be able to identify, manage and monitor their data and business critical systems across their entire digital ecosystem. This is where data discovery comes in.
Why data discovery is essential for business resilience
Visibility across fragmented environments
With the rise of hybrid cloud, multi-cloud and SaaS adoption, data is more distributed than ever. Organizations are no longer constrained within their own network perimeter, and instead operate across a highly fragmented digital landscape – often with delegated rather than centralized oversight.
Data discovery can provide visibility across the entire digital footprint, enabling organizations to identify critical data assets, validate data flows and detect shadow data stores.
Accelerated incident response and recovery
With a purpose-built data discovery solution in place, organizations can accelerate their response to incidents and events, rapidly identifying affected data and systems. This enables more effective recovery and supports breach notification mandates of regulations such as DORA, and privacy laws including GDPR, HIPAA and APA.
Regulatory compliance
A resilience program underpinned by data discovery, ensuring ongoing visibility of data across the business, enables organizations to meet and evidence compliance with their regulatory obligations.
As well as supporting a timely and effective response to adverse events, this reduces the risk of fines and reputational harm resulting from an incident.
Risk-based prioritization and informed decision making
The ability to monitor high-risk and sensitive data assets over time provides crucial insights, essential for anticipating and mitigating emerging threats. This approach further supports preemptive response planning and agile decision making in a crisis.
Enterprise Recon: Enabling data-driven resilience
Ground Labs’ Enterprise Recon – an award-winning data discovery and data management solution – helps organizations build resilience by delivering continuous visibility into sensitive data across all environments. It enables faster incident response, supports regulatory compliance and provides the insight needed to prioritize risks and maintain control. By integrating seamlessly into broader resilience strategies, Enterprise Recon turns data discovery into a critical enabler of business continuity.
A symbiotic relationship
In an uncertain and unpredictable world, resilience is an organization’s competitive edge. To thrive in the current threat landscape, businesses must be agile enough to respond and adapt to inevitable disruption. Data discovery is the foundation that makes it possible.
Ready to enhance your business resilience? Arrange a complimentary data risk assessment or book a call with one of our experts today.