20 Tech Experts On How To Boost Operational Resilience
Managing risk and boosting resilience is an important initiative for organizations—particularly so for the finance, healthcare and logistics sectors. From cyberattacks to global market shifts, developing solid strategies to not only recover from disruption, but also to function smoothly in the midst of it requires careful review of all elements of an organization, including finances, tech stacks, team makeup, workplace culture and more.
Resilience is a cross-functional initiative, but as operations across industries increasingly rely on technology, a tech leader plays a vital role in resilience planning. Below, members of Forbes Technology Council share their top tips for building operational resilience.
1. Take A Disciplined Approach Using A Simple Framework
The biggest challenges in maintaining operational resilience are having an approach to planning and making time to do the planning. Business and technology leaders need to take a disciplined approach to preparing for events, using a simple framework for assessing, deciding on, planning for and implementing initiatives focused on their key organizational structures. – Patrick Esposito, ACME General Corp.
2. Look Beyond Resilience In Architecture
The biggest challenge is leaders failing to acknowledge the fact that resilience is one of the key factors behind keeping your business running around the clock, 365 days a year. Resilience doesn’t just mean ensuring your architecture is resilient; it’s about fostering resilient people, processes and technology. – Kingsuk Chakrabarty, Estee Lauder Companies
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3. Build Resilience In Cloud Systems With Automation And Regular Testing
The biggest challenge in staying resilient is handling unexpected disruptions, especially in cloud systems. Data loss, access issues or cloud infrastructure failures can cause downtime. Companies can overcome this by leveraging automation, backup systems and regular testing. One-click-based failovers and smart monitoring help catch issues early, keeping systems reliable even when things go wrong. – Balvinder Singh Banjardar, Walmart Global Tech
4. Seek Out Weak Spots Before Scaling
One of the biggest challenges in operational resilience is scaling fast without exposing hidden weak spots. I’ve seen companies grow rapidly, only to realize their infrastructure isn’t as resilient as they thought. The key is automated risk detection, regular stress testing and making resilience a shared responsibility across teams—before a crisis forces it to the top of the agenda. – Haider Ali, WebFoundr
5. Invest In Proactive Preparation
The biggest challenge in maintaining operational resilience is reacting instead of preparing. Too many companies wait for disruptions instead of building systems that adapt. The fix? Invest in redundancy, automation and clear response playbooks. Run stress tests, train teams for crisis scenarios and design for flexibility, so when things go wrong, you’re ready to pivot instead of panic. – Luis Peralta, Parallel Plus, Inc.
6. Identify Dependencies In Interconnected Systems
The biggest challenge is often the complexity of interconnected systems, which makes it hard to identify all critical dependencies. Organizations can overcome this by investing in identifying all internal and external components (for example, IT systems, people, workflows) and regular testing across all business areas, fostering a culture of proactive risk management. – Ashish Bhardwaj, Google
7. Gain Full Visibility Into Your Environment
The biggest challenge is simply gaining visibility into your environment. You cannot protect what you cannot see. Visibility also means understanding your environment’s interdependence. This is simple to achieve but often overlooked in the quest for complex solutions. The butterfly effect is a chaos theory principle that describes how small changes can lead to big consequences. – Shailesh Manjrekar, Fabrix.ai
8. Leverage AI For Scenario-Based Modeling
The biggest challenge in achieving resilience is not redundancy, but systematically anticipating and adapting to disruptions before they occur. To compete, organizations are leveraging AI for scenario-based modeling and developing robust contingency plans. Prescriptive and anticipatory models and adaptable response frameworks enable businesses to manage risks proactively and respond quickly. – Stephen DeAngelis, Enterra Solutions
9. Help Team Members Avoid Chronic Stress And Burnout
Operational resilience depends on people, but chronic stress and burnout reduces teams’ ability to adapt during crises. Usually, overworked employees become disengaged and/or error-prone—or they leave. Prioritize human sustainability by rotating on-call duties, encouraging downtime and training resilience squads. Normalize mental health support and reward proactive solutions, helping teams build through chaos. – Shweta Agrawal, Boston New Technology
10. Avoid Reliance On Outdated Risk Models
A big challenge in maintaining operational resilience is keeping pace with emerging threats that evolve faster than traditional defenses. Many organizations rely on outdated risk models, leaving gaps in security. Implementing continuous threat intelligence, AI-driven anomaly detection and adaptive security frameworks can help detect and neutralize risks before they escalate. – Parya Lotfi, DuckDuckGoose
11. Focus On Real-Time Containment, Identification And Remediation Processes
A big challenge is knowing what you don’t know. Solid operational resilience requires more than just holding tabletop exercises to identify weak points and monitoring compliance, patches, keys and certificates. You must first prevent problems from spreading. Second, you need to identify, stop and remediate issues when they arise with real-time visibility and access into servers, desktops, mobile devices and kiosks. – Elise London, Lakeside Software
12. Develop Proper Data Backup And Recovery Solutions
One of the biggest challenges in maintaining operational resilience is having proper data backup and recovery solutions. In the face of a disaster, you need to be able to replicate your data to a secure location to protect against potential loss or corruption and swiftly recover it. This offers peace of mind that the business is equipped to handle and recover from unforeseen data loss incidents. – David Bennett, Object First
13. Map Ecosystems, Prioritize Critical Apps And Manage Interdependencies
Operational resilience is crucial for business continuity in today’s fast-paced digital landscape. Organizations must map ecosystems, prioritize critical applications and manage interdependencies to prevent disruptions. Regulations like DORA emphasize scenario testing and disaster recovery. Overcoming fragmented governance and aligning IT with business goals are key steps toward sustainable resilience. – Archaana Pattabhii, Citigroup
14. Implement Robust Access Controls And Privileged Access Management Systems
In today’s threat environment, outdated security systems are a major impediment to maintaining operational resilience. To overcome this, organizations should implement robust yet streamlined access controls and privileged access management systems. This strengthens cyber hygiene, protects sensitive data and ensures continued operational resilience. – Fran Rosch, Imprivata
15. Balance Resilience With Reality
IT organizations need to balance the outcome of resilience with the realities of their business, staff capabilities and more. The biggest oversight I see is organizations simply not knowing what they have—and that it is a major risk. In the end, IT leaders want to be in the risk reduction business. – Rick Vanover, Veeam
16. Overcome Staff Resistance To Change With Strong Leadership Strategies
Change is natural for the operational health of evolving tech companies. However, so too is human resistance to that change, stemming from individual, cultural and operational factors. This human challenge also evolves as a company grows. To overcome this, organizations need strong support from leadership, clear change management techniques and effective communication and collaboration. – Venkatesh Jayaraman, ModMed
17. Design Resilient Architectures To Isolate Failures
A major challenge in operational resilience is poor architectural design. Organizations can address this by building resilient architectures with loosely coupled systems, ensuring failures in one area don’t impact other areas. They can also implement redundancy and robust disaster recovery planning to maintain continuity and recover quickly from disruptions. – Madhavi Najana, Federal Home Loan Bank Of Cincinnati
18. Clearly Define Roles To Enable Quick Incident Response
Organizations struggle to balance rapid action with clear accountability during incidents, leading to stalled or ill-informed decisions. Executive leaders must delegate authority transparently while retaining oversight. To address this, maintain up-to-date incident response plans that define roles, authority and communication channels, and build trust with regular cross-team tabletop exercises. – Ilia Sotnikov, Netwrix
19. Implement Robust Data Governance Frameworks
Data management is the biggest operational resilience challenge. Organizations face data quality issues that affect decisions, growing storage needs, privacy regulations, and complex access control requirements. To overcome these issues, companies must implement data governance frameworks, adopt cloud storage and maintain clear access policies. Regular security audits and monitoring ensure data integrity. – Neel Sendas, Amazon
20. Break Down Team Silos
The biggest challenge is siloed planning and decision-making across teams—because when teams are not working together cohesively, it increases the chances that you won’t identify near-term risks that could impact your business. By improving collaboration, communication and data-sharing efforts across teams, operational planning and decision-making becomes more aligned across the business. – Igor Rikalo, o9 Solutions