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Resilience has never been more important!
The pandemic made Business continuity and business resiliency one of the key focus areas of nearly every senior management team and board of directors. Enormous foresight and planning are required by businesses to ensure they have sufficient redundancies built and ready to go live in cases of crisis. The goal has always been to ensure there is minimal impact on critical activities of the business in times of crisis, and the organization can quickly recover to its normal state of operations.
However, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world, a lot of businesses found themselves trying to catch up with the magnitude and pace of developments. Globally, notions of “normal” were quickly replaced by the “new normal”. While businesses had continuity and resiliency plans built to operate within their business models, the “new normal” required increasingly flexible and adaptive changes to the business models of corporations in most sectors and industries. With the new business models also came new varieties of risks, especially to the organizations with footprints in multiple regions and geographies.
While organizations world over had been incorporating the adoption of digital technologies in their operations, the pandemic made this a necessity. In the times of lockdowns, social distancing requirements, and dire risks to the health and well-being of people, digital technologies became the way to go for countless businesses who had to adapt to new business models and monitor their risks globally to sustain and continue their operations. Digital transformation efforts had to take the front seat, and the pandemic added its complexity to new and existing efforts of businesses to pivot to technology-driven models.
The pandemic times pushed companies over to their technological tipping points that speeded the adoption of digital and cloud-based environments several years forward, as it forms an essential part of competitive business strategies today. Well strategized and implemented digital transformation solutions can result in immense benefits to businesses, including decreased costs, increase in value, driving efficiencies, boosting performance, and even improving engagement with clients, customers, and employees. The challenge for businesses has been to achieve value-driven transformation and innovation amid the ongoing operational and competitive challenges that face every organization.
To have digital transformation at scale, organization need to have effective and efficient ways to establish trust.
Key focus areas for businesses are
Forward planning is required to be prepared for the unforeseen is important for businesses to flourish keeping in mind the changing environment. Business continuity and Business resiliency both are extremely important and are used interchangeably but are different in some ways.
Business helps an organization to continue to run their business/deliver eservices or products at acceptable predefined levels following a disruption whereas Business Resilience helps prepare, anticipate, respond, and adapt to sudden disruptions and incremental changes externally.
Business continuity and business resilience have emerged as a key priority in this increasingly digital, technology-driven new normal. Security teams have had to scale and adapt to tackle the risks posed by teleworking. Cyber security strategies have seen seismic realignments to adapt to the new approaches required for businesses to function through the pandemic. Adoption of cloud technologies, aggressive update and patching schedules, recalibration of Authentication-Authorization-Access controls, and bottom-up risk assessments are required to ensure businesses stay protected against the fresh variety of risks they face due to the relatively sudden necessity of digital transformation and adoption of digital technologies.
And there are cyber security risks galore! Cyber-attacks have increased multifold since the pandemic struck. Phishing has consistently been identified as the most common cyber-attack experienced by companies, and also the greatest source of top global frauds. Businesses would have to invest greatly in training and awareness efforts for their employees to minimize them falling victim to such attacks, impacting both individuals and companies at large. B2C companies now relying on digital technologies to interact with their customers have also been required to double down in their efforts to reach customers through diverse communication channels, while also protecting themselves against brand abuse. Ransomware attacks have also seen a massive increase since the pandemic. Organizations now have to discover secure ways of continuing their business activities while tackling a great variety of risks – as internal risks have spread from offices to all over the globe thanks to teleworking, and external risks have become increasingly common in the new normal.
With the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, responding to a crisis now comes with additional preparations and a heightened need for trust and transformation to facilitate more effective business resilience.
Technology transformation is an essential part of competitive business strategies today – a strategic transformation can help increase value, decrease costs, drive efficiencies, boost performance and even improve engagement for clients and employees. The challenge is to achieve value-driven transformation and innovation amid the ongoing operational and competitive challenges that face every organization. Building resiliency in businesses and ensuring business continuity now heavily rely on Trust and Transformation.
Digital services, innovation and having a resilient environment are the keys to a Trust and Transformation strategy. Grant Thornton Technology Transformation team understands this challenge and applies deep technology, data, cloud and automation experience with fresh strategic thinking and proven partners to find the best path to your goals and solutions to your complex challenges. Understanding that digital services and innovation are key to a transformation strategy. Also exploring emerging and proven technologies to align with and enable transformation; develop approaches for leveraging IA, design thinking and digital ideation; and provide evaluation and implementation support in these and other critical areas.
This article was originally published in ETCIO.com.