Resilience and continuity are not the same thing
Business continuity asks how the organisation recovers after a disruption. Operational resilience asks whether it can keep delivering its important business services through one. Continuity management, aligned to ISO 22301, is a component of resilience rather than a substitute for it, and regulators across the region have moved their expectations accordingly.
Where organisations are exposed
Plans that have never been tested under pressure. Recovery time objectives set by the team that wrote them rather than by the business. Dependencies on a single supplier, a single system or a single person that nobody has mapped. And an impact analysis that assessed processes rather than the services a customer or regulator would actually notice failing.
How CLA Emirates approaches it
We start from the important business services and work back to what supports them, which is the opposite of how most continuity programmes were built. That produces a business impact analysis grounded in tolerance for disruption, continuity and disaster recovery plans that name owners and triggers, and testing designed to find the failure rather than to pass. Findings go to the board with a view on which dependencies are genuinely single points of failure.
