Disaster Recovery Journal Spring 2023

The fact the organization is equipped with measures to implement operational resilience means it has taken serious pre cautions against all kinds of risks, has taken action, created awareness, and con veyed all these to all its stakeholders. Can we not take sufficient precautions with BC/DR processes? The biggest dif ference, as we mentioned above, in resil ience is proactive, while the BC/DR duo is more reactive; that is, it mainly focuses on issues after the disaster. Yes, there are preparations for before, like emergency plans, but these are not operational prepa rations, they are plans to prevent confu sion for the aftermath. We need to be more vigilant, cautious, prepared, in short resil ient, so we can be affected by the potential disaster in the least possible way. It would not be right to limit opera tional resilience to only physical disasters such as earthquakes and floods. The word “resilient” also means to be durable for all conditions and situations. In fact, we have experienced the biggest example of this with the pandemic. In a time when we are experiencing massive closures, orga

nizations which established the resilience methodology survived this period very easily. They quickly put their work-from home structure into practice and contin ued to employ all their employees under safe conditions, without having to close. Fortunately, some that were not prepared for this situation were able to survive this process with temporary closures or serious damage. Apart from the pandemic, events such as cyberattacks, new regulations, and laws (which require rapid adaptation) are among the critical elements to affect the continuity of your organization, depend ing on resilience. While a bank which has suffered a serious disaster tries to prevent the loss of customers, an upstate factory affected by a forest fire will focus on establishing a safer, more sustainable work environment for its workers. What can we do to provide operational resilience? Let’s talk briefly about prepa ration and maturity. Here, we accept your BC/DR structure is managed smoothly with a very good methodology; everything from business impact analysis to disaster

plans, from trained expert teams to disas ter tests, is well planned and operated. If these structures do not exist, or if they are not built and operated properly, it is nec essary to establish this first and consider operational resilience as a second step. The BC/DR structure must be set up first. What should be done to manage this process? The path from BC/DR to opera tional resilience is a little bit about how seriously you take this job and how serious you want to take measures. As I mentioned earlier, you will need to increase precau tions when faced with the possibility of serious risks and high potential disasters. However, if we are talking about, for example, the headquarters or data center of an organization with no threat of earth quakes or floods, actions to be taken regarding these issues will be reduced accordingly. Let’s assume you have been running basic business continuity methodology for years. From here, you may seek additional domains on the way to operational resil ience. These domains were created with a very broad perspective and offer a solution

38 DISASTER RECOVERY JOURNAL | SPRING 2023