Operational Resilience

For many years, operational resilience was understood narrowly as disaster recovery: the ability to restore systems after a failure. That framing is no longer adequate. Clients, regulators and boards now expect firms to be able to continue operating through disruption, not merely to recover from it. The question has shifted from “can we get back up?” to “can we keep serving clients while we deal with this?”

This is a meaningful change. It moves resilience from a technical concern, owned by the IT function, to a business capability owned by the board. And it requires firms to think not in terms of systems alone, but in terms of the services clients depend on and the confidence those clients place in the firm.

Start with what clients depend on

The most useful starting point for resilience is not the technology estate but the firm’s most important services. What are the things the firm absolutely must be able to do, even on a difficult day? Once those are clear, the dependencies beneath them — systems, suppliers, data, people — can be traced, and the firm can decide how much disruption to each it could tolerate before clients are affected.

This reframing matters because it keeps the focus on impact rather than on assets. A firm does not need every system to be equally resilient. It needs the services that protect clients and revenue to be resilient, and it needs to know which those are.

Resilience that has not been tested is only an assumption

The single most common weakness in resilience planning is that it has never been tested. Plans exist on paper, arrangements are assumed to work, and recovery routes are believed to be available. Until they are exercised, none of this is more than an assumption — and assumptions have a poor record of surviving real incidents.

The question has shifted from “can we get back up?” to “can we keep serving clients while we deal with this?”

Testing need not be elaborate. A structured exercise that walks the firm’s leadership through a realistic scenario — a critical system unavailable, a supplier failure, a loss of access to client data — surfaces the gaps that paper plans conceal. It reveals who decides, what clients are told, and whether the firm’s confidence in its resilience is justified.

Confidence is the asset being protected

For professional firms, the ultimate asset at risk in any disruption is client confidence. Clients accept that incidents happen. What they judge a firm on is how it responds: whether it is in control, whether it communicates clearly, and whether their interests and information are protected throughout. A firm that handles disruption calmly often emerges with its reputation intact or enhanced. A firm that improvises does not.

This is why resilience is a board issue. It is not principally about technology; it is about the firm’s ability to protect the trust on which its business depends. The board’s role is to insist that the firm understands its critical services, has tested its ability to maintain them, and knows how it would protect clients if the worst occurred.

A proportionate, credible capability

Credible resilience is proportionate. It concentrates effort on the services that matter most, rests on tested evidence rather than assumption, and is owned at the level where the consequences would be felt. Built this way, it is neither expensive nor burdensome — and it is the difference between a firm that absorbs disruption and one that is defined by it.