The DRI International Global Risk and Resilience Trends Report provides a global perspective and comprehensive trends analysis of how resilience professionals view their industry and the external factors that are shaping it. Across the board, these trends and risks are dominating the field.

Top 8 Resilience Trends

The following top trends are provided as helpful guidance for those professionals tasked with managing organizational resilience or similar functions within their companies or other places of work.

1. The predicted consolidation of resilience disciplines seems to have increased over the past year. The main result of this is that fewer organizations have independent business continuity (BC) departments, with BC professionals being incorporated into existing risk management or information security divisions.
2. The scope of work of a BC or resilience professional hasn’t really changed. A number of key risks such as data breach and cyberattacks are still largely outside their remit and treated as security issues. Since full prevention is impossible, organizations must have high-quality response and damage limitation plans formulated by skilled planners. Most have not adopted this approach.
3. Across all regions and sectors, it is a concern that over 30 percent of professionals believe that senior management doesn’t understand their resilience role; over 20 percent do not believe they get adequate support from senior management; and less than 50 percent believe their organizations are “well-prepared.”
4. A significant concern is that many C-Level executives have no direct experience of managing a major disruptive event. Most senior managers understand the importance of crisis communications with the media, but they don’t have crisis management skills beyond that. There is a concern that despite having risk and continuity programs, inappropriate decisions taken during a crisis could put the entire enterprise at risk.
5. Professionals must have a common base of skills to manage IT disruptions and physical interruptions, such as natural or man-made disasters. Beyond that baseline, however, their expertise will be largely sector-specific. There is little difference in the main priorities of a single sector across regions, but there are significant differences among sectors even in the same country or city. This means that careerwise it is difficult to move among sectors without accepting that there will be a steep learning curve.
6. Resilience professionals often have the best overview of how a business functions as well as the risks posed by dependencies and disruptions. This expertise is still not utilized as widely as it should be. Of the top 10 resilience issues identified, four of these are addressed by most organizations with no input from BC or resilience specialists.
7. There is no evidence that a silo mentality is hindering the adoption of a more comprehensive resilience framework. Most resilience areas understand the role of others and cooperate well. The problem lies more with senior management, which often is concerned more about compliance than effectiveness. It is easier to designate responsibility and demonstrate compliance in a traditional departmental structure than a highly integrated one.
8. Although there is no direct evidence that any of the resilience disciplines (in particular BC) are unable to gain access to senior management, BC is often still viewed as a separate discipline from risk (despite the aforementioned consolidation of resilience disciplines) and consistently fails to make itself relevant enough to the concerns of top executives. The vision of a holistic resilience framework is still not fully in place in many organizations.

Top 10 Risks

Additional Resources

You can download the complete Fourth Annual Risk and Resilience Trends Report from the DRI Resource Library (log in with your free DRI account).

Hear more about this report – as well as predictions for 2019 – at the Future Vision Committee session at DRI2019 in Las Vegas Feb. 17-20.

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As a globally recognized certification organization, DRI provides education and credentials for resilience professionals in many sectors, including:

• Business Continuity
• Business Continuity Audit
• Healthcare Continuity
• Risk Management Continuity
• Public Sector Continuity, and
• Cyber-Resilience Continuity.

Click here for our 2019 course list, or call 866-542-3744.

Our webinar series covers many of the major issues featured in the report. Recent presentations include:

• GDPR
• Cyber-Resilience
• Public-Private Partnerships
• Compliance and Regulations
• Internet of Things
• Active Shooter and Mass Casualty Response