Are You Prepared for the Road Ahead?

How to Become a Resilient Organization

Rapid technological advancements, workforces moving to remote and hybrid IT systems, skyrocketing cyberattacks, stalling economies, and who could forget the kicker, a global pandemic.

If the last year and a half have taught us anything it is that the world can undergo tremendous change in a very short time and that only resilient organizations can weather these storms.

That’s why the concept of organizational resilience is now more relevant than ever before. Organizational resilience is all about how well a company anticipates, plans for, and responds to gradual changes as well as unexpected disruptions in its business environment so that it can continue to operate and thrive.

Organizations and individuals that discovered meaningful ways to practice resilience in the face of change, from remote and hybrid IT workspaces to digital acceleration, and other means depending on their specific area of operation proved to have an enormous strategic advantage.

Clearly it would behoove anyone to cultivate a resilient culture in their organization so that they aren’t caught off guard when disruptions occur.

Remember, if your people, processes, and technologies aren’t resilient, your business will have a tough time recovering from potential setbacks such as downtime-induced financial loss or a dissatisfied workforce.

What Traits Does a Resilient Organization Exemplify?

Organizations that recover quickly from setbacks typically incorporate the following traits and actions:

Foster an environment for innovation

An organization’s employees are among its most valuable assets. You can encourage innovation among your employees by creating a work culture that supports creative thinking and effective communication. This will empower them to contribute their knowledge, abilities, and suggestions.

An innovative work culture ensures that everyone in the company works towards improving business practices, productivity, and overall resilience.

An innovative organization can quickly come up with multiple strategies to deal with a crisis.

Adapt to meet changing customer needs

Consumer demands and behavior are influenced by global events. With that in mind, if a customer-focused company wants to survive and prepare for the future, it must understand and adapt to changes.

Asking these three questions will provide organizations with perspective:

• What are our customers’ behaviors?
• Why do our customers behave that way?
• What do we need to alter to cater to a new set of demands and behaviors?

Overcome reputational and organizational setbacks

Almost every firm will face reputational or organizational setbacks at some point during its lifespan. Some businesses may crumble because of their inability to prepare for and recover from such change and challenges.

However, the resilient ones will do everything in their power to identify the source of the setback, rectify the damage caused and make communication with stakeholders transparent.

Rise to the challenge

While it’s impossible to control what challenges your business encounters, you can certainly control how you deal with them.

A resilient organization will be better equipped to stand firm in the face of severe adversity and will have the means to recover as quickly as possible.

Tactics of Resilient Organizations

Prioritize the following tactics to nurture a resilient organization:

Proactive cybersecurity planning

This may require implementing guidelines from The International Standards Organization (ISO), The British Standards Institute (BSI) or the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) Cyber Security Framework, depending on your industry and location.

An IT company or hybrid IT provider can be helpful as a consultant for meeting these regulatory standards or just implementing them for you.

Protection of intellectual property (IP)

This is more of a legal and operational task, and includes having the right employee, contractor, and partnership agreements in place to avoid critical organizational IP from being disclosed.

Here again, IT MSP services can be instrumental as intellectual property is often a valuable target in a malicious data breach.

Implementation of uptime safeguards

This requires being able to restore service via automatic failover or backup and recovery. Data backup and disaster recovery for in-office, remote, and/or hybrid IT workspaces is one of our foundational specialties at Sequentur and we would be happy to answer any questions you may have, or simply take care of this for your company.

Contingency plan mapping

This one is easy to overlook, but your team already knowing what to do when things go wrong is vital to becoming more resilient.

Build a business continuity and disaster recovery plan that lays out contingency plans for events like downtime, evacuations and so on, to be better prepared for tricky situations.

Of course, this will look different for each unique business. Practice identifying areas of potential risk in your operations.

Is everyone who would need to act knowledgeable of and competent with the actions they would need to take should those risks come to pass?

In Summary

Working to build a resilient organization is a substantial commitment in terms of time and resources, especially while running a business.

But the rewards of being able to remain operational even in challenging times when others cannot, can be immensely valuable for your organization.

Taking this task on by yourself can be daunting as there are so many aspects to consider. Partnering with an expert IT service company like Sequentur takes all the worry of cyber resilience off your shoulders, leaving you free to concentrate time and effort on your overall operations and the resiliency of your company in your field.

Contact us today to schedule a consultation to find out if managed IT services are a good fit for your company.