Fragile to Agile: The State of Operational Resilience

An essential component of business continuity management, operational resilience is the ability to:

• Identify and mitigate potential risks
• Prevent outages and future issues
• Accelerate responses to ongoing disruptions

It involves understanding the different parts of the business supply chain how they interact with stakeholders, workflows, and tools, while fostering a culture of intentional learning and adaptation.

Closely intertwined with cybersecurity, operational resilience focuses on an organization's ability to withstand, recover from, and adapt to cyber-attacks, all while minimizing the business impact of these disruptions.

Historically, achieving an operational resilience framework has been challenging due to significant observability gaps between on-premises and cloud-based networks and infrastructures. These gaps lead to tool and workload sprawl, siloed information, and disconnected data. As a result, Information Technology teams struggle to focus on impactful activities that help maintain business continuity. This hampers operational resiliency and affects stakeholders, who rely on consistent and reliable business service delivery to carry out normal business operations and ensure customer satisfaction.

Real-time visibility reduces operational risk management, lowers incident response times, and streamlines decision making.

For operational resilience, full-stack observability is essential for both business continuity and risk management as it provides comprehensive visibility across all services and data. By consolidating all data into a single pane of glass, IT systems can effectively monitor and spot vulnerabilities, distinguishing critical issues from routine noise.

This enhanced visibility optimizes proactive risk assessment and mitigation and reduces third-party risk by ensuring that potential threats are addressed before they can impact business operations.

Additionally, full-stack observability is crucial for measuring and improving Mean Time to X (MTTx) metrics, which are key indicators of operational resilience. By reducing the time it takes to detect and resolve issues, businesses can maintain reliability and minimize the risk of downtime, thereby safeguarding business continuity and overall performance.

From an operational resilience perspective, the most common pain points in maintaining business continuity are:

1. Customer Experience (71%): When critical issues and outages occur, the first and most immediate impact is on customer experience. Dissatisfied customers can quickly turn to competitors, leading to a loss of trust and loyalty.
2. Lost Revenue (32%): Outages can result in significant financial losses, as businesses may lose sales and revenue during downtime. This can be particularly damaging for e-commerce and service-based companies.
3. Brand Damage (28%): Repeated or severe outages can tarnish a company's reputation, leading to long-term brand damage. This can affect customer trust and make it harder to attract new business.

IT leaders in financial services, healthcare, supply chain, business services, and government agencies are investing in:

• Upskilling staff, hiring people with specific expertise
• Prioritizing automation and AI
• Thoroughly documenting processes and adopting new technology or software upgrades

With disaster recovery (incl. natural disasters and cyber-attacks) in mind, they are also focusing on improving workflows and consolidating tools to ensure they support business processes, service providers and critical operations effectively.

The SolarWinds 2025 IT Trends Report is an annual, independent report that explores the challenges and strategies IT teams face in achieving operational resilience.

It was created through a partnership with UserEvidence, which surveyed over 600 IT leaders. The survey focused on how respondents perceive their organization's operational resilience and the underlying issues that affect it. The respondents were evenly split between three roles: IT operations, Developers, and IT service management, and brought a mix of experience levels ranging from up to 10 years to 15+ years. Organizations of various sizes participated, from those with up to 1,000 employees to those with 5,000 or more.

The majority of respondents (60%) were from the technology sector, while other industries like manufacturing, services and consulting, financial and insurance, and telecommunications were also represented. The survey included IT leaders from nine countries across four continents: Canada, the United States, France, India, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, Singapore, and Saudi Arabia.