Digital resilience encompasses the various ways organizations use digital tools and systems to quickly recover from or adjust to crises and is more crucial than ever in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic - especially when it comes to running a business.

A resilient business can survive storms and find it easier to adapt to change. Resilience in general is a good trait for any business, but digital resilience is even more so in a competitive and constantly changing business landscape.

If you’re not already prioritizing digital resilience for your business, it’s time to get started.

The world is changing and digital transformations are happening every day. Keeping up with the latest tech trends, acquiring necessary digital skills, and adapting core business processes are all critical for business survival in the 21st century.

Here are five ways in which digital resilience is helping businesses make quick adjustments to changing realities:

1. Adopting a solution-focused mindset

Being digitally resilient is all about adapting and being able to manage changes with a solution-focused mindset. Amidst the pandemic, most businesses were forced to pivot, shift or respond to the changing landscape in some way, whether it was a bricks-and-mortar store having to adapt by going online, or an in-office workforce being forced to work remotely.

Businesses had to act fast and efficiently in order to keep their companies afloat and resilient to the COVID-19 storm that was battering many companies around the world with 60% of businesses forced to shut in the United States closing permanently. But having the right tools in place that can offer solutions and systems to help businesses monitor performance, provide excellent customer service, and improve productivity has been crucial to business survival.

As a business owner or manager, you should also recognize that one of the best sources of information on how to improve your business operations comes from your customers. Be sure to make having high quality customer service a top priority, with a ticketing tool that is easily accessible and immediately turns inquiries into incoming emails so you are notified quickly.

So long as you’re going to have a solution-focused mindset, you need to recognize that your customers need to be a major part of coming up with those solutions.

2. Making resilience a team effort

When a company gets serious about being digitally resilient, it puts processes in place to ensure that its digital technologies are protected. It also creates processes for handling emergencies and other issues like cyberattacks. For these processes to be effective, all employees must be on board. This group effort ensures that every layer of the company is focused on digital resilience, which in turn enhances long-term results. In a digitally resilient business, every employee has a role to play.

Educational efforts focus on cybersecurity training for employees, ensuring consistency across all levels. Having good cybersecurity hygiene and habits such as sharing information via secure channels rather than unsecured ones, reduces the risk of compromised security. Companies can also hold ‘cybersecurity emergency drills’ that allow employees to go through a data breach or security threat. These simulated attacks give employees the opportunity to learn how to respond effectively.

Having incident-response plans in place ensures that various cybersecurity issues can be handled more seamlessly, reducing downtime and improving productivity. In companies that prioritize digital resilience, these simulations are held regularly, improving decision making, internal coordination, external coordination, and unity of effort.

3. Preventing deadly cyber attacks

A proactive approach is a critical component of digital resilience. This proactive way of dealing with cybersecurity issues emphasizes the importance of seeing things from the hacker’s perspective, allowing businesses to instill risk management strategies that mitigate risks and enhance digital resiliency.

Active defense processes are used to help businesses stay one step ahead of potential attacks. Through data analytics, a company can identify signs of an impending attack, including suspicious login attempts from unusual locations. With these insights, a business can often prevent potentially serious and devastating attacks while learning from them.

When a company prioritizes digital resilience, it takes steps to stay on top of the latest cybersecurity issues and solutions. Employees within the organization should be tasked with maintaining up-to-date information regarding hackers and their capabilities, which can evolve quickly. When handling customer financial information over online transactions, make sure you rely on accounting or payment services that come with PCI-DSS certification, meaning that all financial data will be kept encrypted with 256-bit encryption and with access restricted only to employees with a unique ID on a need-to-know basis.

It’s also crucial to consider hackers’ intentions. This can all contribute to a company understanding how to actively defend itself against serious risks, enhancing its digital resilience to an incredible extent.

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4. Knowing and prioritizing digital assets

Digital resilience also hinges on understanding a company’s digital assets and prioritizing them according to importance. Companies that are serious about being digitally resilient regularly perform inventories of their digital assets.

During these inventories, a company can identify the most vulnerable digital assets and the primary threats that they face. From there, a business can focus on reducing risks to its most essential assets instead of applying the same standards to all of them. This can help reduce cybersecurity costs substantially, so it’s a great way not only to improve security but also to save money.

5. Providing stronger protection for critical assets

Finally, a digitally resilient company uses the information it gleans from digital asset inventories to identify and protect its most important assets. In turn, it can pour more money and effort into protecting these critical assets, which is well worth the tradeoff.

Particularly important assets should be protected beyond normal controls like encryption. Additional layers of protection should be used such as authentication, data-loss prevention, intrusion detection, digital rights management, and access rights to shield the most crucial assets, improve peace of mind while dramatically enhancing digital resilience.

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Conclusion

As many businesses learned the hard way from the pandemic, forces beyond your control can quickly cause a huge upheaval in your business and its everyday practices. Since all businesses are now reliant on digital technologies, digital resilience is more crucial than ever.

Having a solid business strategy that has digital resilience as a core business tactic will improve the odds of your company weathering any storm that comes its way, whether it’s another global pandemic, economic crisis, or complex cyberattacks. This will allow your business to adapt quickly, compete effectively, and come out the other end stronger than ever.

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