In boardrooms across Europe, “resilience” has become a familiar — sometimes overused — term. It appears in annual reports, risk matrices, and executive speeches. But too often, it’s misunderstood: reduced to a synonym for business continuity or framed as an abstract goal to be achieved “eventually.” In reality, as we enter 2025, operational resilience is no longer a theoretical concept or a compliance checkbox. It has become a strategic imperative — not just to satisfy regulators, but to protect reputation, enable agility, and sustain performance in a world where disruption is the norm, not the exception.
At Intarmour, we’ve witnessed this shift firsthand. One of our recent engagements with a mid-sized European enterprise began with a simple request: support their efforts to align with updated regulatory requirements around risk governance and service continuity.
We need greater control, faster response, and a cultural transformation that embedded resilience across the business.
Why Resilience Matters Now
For many, resilience was once synonymous with business continuity — disaster recovery plans, backups, maybe a few simulation drills. Today, that’s no longer enough. Operational resilience is about your ability to absorb shocks, adapt under stress, and continue delivering critical services under any circumstance — whether it’s a cyberattack, a third-party failure, or a regional disruption.
This is not a future concern. It’s happening now. Regulations like DORA and the updated NIS2 Directive demand more than policies — they require proof that resilience is embedded in every layer of the organization. For our client, that meant going far beyond IT and into leadership, procurement, compliance, and customer operations.
Beyond Checklists: Building Real Resilience
One of the first realizations was that resilience isn’t a project — it’s a mindset. The organization needed to shift away from siloed, reactive processes and toward a unified operational model. That began by mapping critical services, understanding their dependencies, and defining what “impact tolerance” really meant in context — not as a theoretical metric, but as a business reality.
We worked closely with risk managers, CTOs, and internal audit teams to evaluate how disruptions might ripple through systems and teams. Rather than rely on generic incident response templates, we developed custom scenarios, aligned with actual business processes. These were not static documents but living frameworks, practiced, refined, and integrated into governance routines.
The shift was not only technological — it was cultural.
Culture is the True Foundation
Perhaps the most important insight from this engagement was that tools alone don’t make you resilient. Firewalls and failovers are essential, but they’re useless if no one knows who owns a service during an incident. Dashboards don’t help if teams can’t interpret the data or escalate effectively. Data backups are meaningless if no one has tested a real-world restoration under time pressure.
We helped leadership create a culture of psychological safety, where people felt empowered to flag risks, challenge assumptions, and collaborate openly. Transparency around incidents, clear communication from executives, and shared learning opportunities helped embed resilience into daily operations — not as a checklist item, but as part of how the business thinks and acts.
From Compliance Burden to Competitive Advantage
This organization didn’t just meet the minimum standards — they moved ahead of them. With new structures in place, they began measuring not just uptime, but recovery speed. Not just vendor performance, but vendor resilience. KPIs evolved from transactional metrics to indicators of long-term sustainability.
More importantly, the executive team began to understand resilience as a differentiator. In stakeholder conversations, investor briefings, and client meetings, the ability to absorb disruption became a mark of maturity — not an operational cost, but a business asset.
Looking Ahead: A New Operating Model
Today, this client treats resilience not as a compliance effort, but as a core component of operational excellence. Change management is tied to risk assessments. Third-party evaluations include resilience scoring. Strategic decisions now include resilience impact modeling — helping the organization stay ahead of both regulations and unexpected challenges.
This isn’t unique. Across sectors, the leaders of 2025 are those who build resilience in by design, not by necessity. They don’t wait for audits or incidents to act. They view operational strength as a long-term investment — one that protects their mission, reinforces trust, and fuels innovation.
