Digital Resilience White Paper Published by ISRS and Shearwater Group

The Institute for Strategy, Resilience & Security (ISRS) at University College London (UCL) in association with Shearwater Group plc (LON:SWG), announced the release of a new white paper entitled Digital Resilience – Understanding The Challenges of Resilience in Digital Environments.

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“Digital Resilience” a white paper published by ISRS in association with Shearwater Group

The Rt Hon. Lord Reid of Cardowan, Executive Chairman of ISRS commented: “Digital technology has become a vital infrastructure underpinning the functioning of every aspect of human society, and is increasingly interwoven with decision making and business processes. Failures of imagination by leadership teams to consider both the opportunities and risks that emerge from the digital environment represent potent catalysts of future existential crises. This new white paper attempts to draw out some of the most important issues for senior executives and illustrates the need for assessment of digital resilience in terms of the capability of their organisations to anticipate, respond, learn and evolve. I believe that there has never been a more important time to do so.”

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The paper highlights digital resilience as addressing both organisational survival and success equally, encompassing the need to maintain an evolutionary and competitive strategy in an emerging digital environment, while managing the risks generated. It emphasises the critical importance of assessing innovation opportunities and capability gaps in the face of digital hyper-competition, as well as exposure of irreplaceable, ‘digitally dependent’ core processes to vulnerabilities such as technology failure, cyberattack and machine learning bias, which can combine and cascade in unexpected ways.

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The white paper argues that digital resilience is therefore about acquiring a dynamic state of continual evolution and learning within the digital environment. When fully understood and implemented, digital resilience should enable an organisation to anticipate and use new challenges, not merely to rebound, but to bounce forward, with crises becoming pointers towards opportunity and catalysts for evolution.

The paper observes that many organisations have yet to accept and internalise at a senior leadership level the degree to which their operational resilience is coincident with digital resilience. It proposes an assessment process and framework of key questions for leaders to define, identify and address digital resilience opportunities, both from a business and technology perspective.