Disaster Recovery Journal Spring 2025

create and maintain plans, perform tests, and handle incident management – have the highest numbers of respondents plan ning to implement or expand (see Figure 5). Critical event management software – to create incident dashboards with real time datasets, such as severe weather, and to send customized communications during an incident to different internal and external groups – has the lowest number of respondents planning to implement or expand (24%) and the most not inter ested (25%). Contract lifecycle manage ment (CLM) has similarly low numbers of respondents planning to implement or expand (28%) and not interested (20%). CLM is a must-have technology for opera tional resilience, as the mandates require contracts to include exit strategies and force majeure language. Invocations Call for Greater Focus on Operational Resilience While 30% of respondents did not invoke a critical incident/risk event (an event that has significant business, finan cial, or reputational impacts or disrup tions) in the past 12 months, 64% of respondents had at least one, and 15% had four or more. The prevalence of IT failures (59%) and IT security incidents (29%) proves the impetus for operational resil ience mandates and their focus on main taining the IT assets that support critical/ important customer services. IT Failure Tops the List of Invocation Causes as Epidemics/Pandemics Fade After events such as the CrowdStrike content configuration update that affected

an estimated 8.5 million Windows systems worldwide, it’s no surprise IT failures topped the list of causes of invocations of a plan (see Figure 6). However, after 2023’s continued invocations due to pandemics/epidemics, which we attribute to COVID-19, only 10% of respondents continue to invoke for health and safety incidents. Extreme weather (33%) continues to plague respon dents, but power outages had a smaller role in plan invocations (10%). We link these last two causes together: Organizations that don’t plan for alternative power sources can be incapacitated when extreme weather disrupts power. Communication Tops the List of Lessons Learned A fundamental goal of resilience planning is to get everyone

14 DISASTER RECOVERY JOURNAL | SPRING 2025