Disaster Recovery Journal Winter 2025

Establishing a Resilience Council: Bridging the Gap Between Strategy and Practice

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By SCOTT BALENTINE

The Illusion of Cross Functional Resilience

esilience is no longer a topic confined to risk management teams or IT departments— it has become a

collaboratively. This lack of integration results in significant blind spots and a hidden gap between preparedness on paper and performance in practice. The creation of a resilience council directly addresses this challenge by providing a unified governance structure that brings diverse functions together under one cohesive strategy. In doing so, organizations can align their resilience objectives with their mission, risk appetite, and regulatory obligations, while ensuring plans are not only written but also lived across the enterprise.

One of the most common pitfalls organizations encounter is believing resilience exists because individual departments have their own continuity or contingency plans. For example, IT may have a robust disaster recovery framework, HR may have policies for maintaining workforce availability, and operations may oversee vendor continuity. However, in the absence of a central governing body, these plans often operate in silos. When a real crisis strikes, these silos create confusion: IT may prioritize restoring systems, HR may focus on employee

board-level imperative. In an era defined by

escalating cyber threats, supply chain vulnerabilities, climate-related disruptions, and global pandemics, organizations face a constantly evolving risk environment. Yet many institutions still approach resilience in a fragmented manner, with departments acting independently rather than

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