In today’s world, where natural disasters, terrorist threats, and cyberattacks are becoming increasingly common, business leaders must prioritize building resilience to ensure the long-term success of their organizations. However, the ways an organization can adapt, recover, and thrive in the face of adversity are often unclear.

Global climate change continues to have a profound impact on businesses worldwide, with chronic hazards such as flooding, wildfires, and extreme weather conditions posing a significant risk to industries. As organizations continue to operate in an increasingly interconnected world, they face a growing range of challenges. One such challenge is the impact of chronic hazards on their operations.

It is no surprise that resilience has become a frequently identified trait for success. McKinsey stated, “To thrive in the coming decade, companies must develop resilience—the ability to withstand unpredictable threat or change and then to emerge stronger. However, how can organizations measure their resilience in the first place? Strengthening resilience requires organizations to take a step back and assess how they measure up to their competitors and what processes need the most attention.

Disaster recovery (DR) plans are not one-size-fits-all. There’s no silver bullet, and without a clear understanding and some level of customization, a DR plan done wrong will have detrimental effects on an organization’s operations and business. And let’s not forget the wrecking ball a bad DR plan delivers to the VAR or MSP who designed and executed it. Loss of business aside, there’s guilt, reputation damage, and potential lawsuits. It’s not a good day.

Resilience is more than just a goal that organizations strive to achieve. With an increased number of critical events, including cyber-attacks, extreme weather and violent crime, resilience is vital for the short-term and long-term success of any operation. Everbridge and Atos sought out to find the links between resilience and success, with a report from Dr. Stefan Vieweg, Director of the Institute for Compliance and Corporate Governance (ICC) at the Rheinische Fachhochschule in Cologne, Germany.

Around six years ago on a Wednesday morning, software professionals worldwide were startled by a tweet from GitLab stating that they had accidentally deleted their production data, causing their site to go offline. Unfortunately, at that point in time, the open-source code repository giant had no idea that it would take them another 36 hours to restore their systems only to learn that 5,000 projects and 700 new user accounts were affected while they were fixing the outage.