Operational Resilience and Consistency

The resilience disciplines, that the BCM and DR frameworks address for the significant disruption scenario, must be complemented by the operational resilience governance that the Security Consulting function advises on for the everyday operational environment whose security events, performance degradations, and service inconsistencies create the cumulative risk that the major incident focus most commonly overshadows without the routine operational governance whose quality the consistent business performance demands. The organisation that plans comprehensively for the significant disruption but neglects the governance of the operational resilience that the business-as-usual environment requires will consistently experience the incremental erosion of the service quality, the data integrity, and the customer confidence that the minor disruptions whose accumulation the BAU governance inadequacy creates produces as the ongoing risk consequence rather than the single acute event whose response the major incident framework addresses.

The Security Consulting function must advise on the BAU operational resilience with the recognition that the boundary between the routine operational security event and the significant incident that the BCM and DR frameworks govern is not always clear at the moment of the event’s occurrence, and that the operational resilience governance whose quality the BAU environment demands provides the early detection capability whose sensitivity identifies the escalating event before it crosses the threshold that the major incident declaration requires, creating the intervention opportunity whose timeliness the early detection enables rather than the reactive response whose latency the escalated incident’s late discovery demands.

Understanding the Operational Risk Landscape #

The operational risk categories whose routine occurrence the BAU environment creates require the Security Consulting function to advise with the practical awareness that the everyday security events, rather than the major incidents, account for the majority of the cumulative security impact that the organisation’s operations experience across the full operational calendar.