Cyber Resilience vs Operational Resilience

Organizations across sectors aim to become more resilient in the face of rising threats like cyberattacks, public health crises, and climate events. But businesses looking to bolster their resilience must understand the distinct concepts of cyber resilience and operational resilience.

Cyber resilience concentrates on preparing for, responding to, and recovering from cyber incidents. This includes disasters like data breaches, ransomware attacks, critical IT infrastructure failures, and other digital crises. It entails protecting hardware, software, networks, data, and devices specifically from cyber threats.

Operational resilience adopts a broader focus on organizational stability through any type of business disruption. This includes cyber events but also encompasses physical threats like fires, supply chain issues, utility outages, pandemics, or extreme weather events. It aims to maintain the delivery of a company’s priority products and services regardless of cause.

While distinct, these two resilience capabilities work symbiotically. Cyber resilience strengthens the IT foundations that operations depend on. Operational resilience provides the enterprise-wide infrastructure to distribute resources, communicate, and recover in a crisis.

An integrated approach builds cyber-specific protections around foundational operational reliability. By managing both cyber and business continuity risks holistically, organizations can confidently handle tumultuous scenarios while continuing to serve client needs.