Resilience boils down to an ability to bounce back from difficulty. Resilient people may be brought down like everyone else — having to declare bankruptcy or receive a grim diagnosis — but the key difference between them and non-resilient people is that they don’t stay down.
The resilient bankrupt ends up building a new and profitable business while the resilient patient sheds bad habits, modifies their diet, thinks positive thoughts, and plows through to the day they receive the good news that their health has come back.
Clear and present danger
The best business leaders today are placing top priority on resilience as a strategy. Their single guiding truth is that without this critical quality in place, organizations are asking for trouble. And the numbers seem to bear this notion out. According to one study, sixty per cent of companies that lose their data will shut down within six months of disaster (Source).
Be that as it may, not all companies have devoted sufficient time and energy to resilience, or taken that crucial one step further to build a resilience strategy. The people who make up these organizations may recognize the value of resilience on a strictly human level, when it comes to health and productivity and such, but as a group they have yet to commit to a truly top-down resilience journey.
The best time is now
As a starting point toward top-down resilience, company leadership must possess that essential mindset individually and as a group. In a world of disruption, leading organizations must engage with resilience at a strategic level. Other companies have no choice but to follow these leaders if they intend to keep pace. Resilience, then, becomes the ability and willingness to respond decisively and successfully to disruption. Those who lead the pack seek not merely to survive but to be the best in the industry.
Today’s business climate doesn’t allow for putting things off. There is no tomorrow when it comes to disaster recovery, there is only today — now. That goes for keeping up with competitors, the strongest of whom leave nothing to chance, as much as it goes for dealing with clients and customers, who demand and have come to expect always-on service.
CIOs and their peers wrestle with the business continuity question daily (and nightly). How does an organization develop a comprehensive IT resilience strategy, all while keeping critical data safe and keeping an eye trained on innovation? Together, it’s a very tall order, but it can be accomplished — it is being accomplished every day by successful companies around the world.
What you need to know
The TeraGo whitepaper “What You Need to Know to Create a Modern Disaster Recovery Plan for the Cloud” explores how to develop a solid resilience plan and what steps you need to take to implement one effectively. The whitepaper also looks into:
- Preparing for planned and unplanned events
- Three pillars of IT cloud resilience
- Why backing up data is not enough
- Making sure your cloud disaster recovery plan works
- Business impact of a single disaster
- Choosing the right cloud service provider
