[OR] [Vs] Why Operational Resilience Is Not Business Continuity (and Why Both Still Matter)

In recent years, operational resilience has emerged as a dominant theme in regulatory expectations and executive discussions, particularly within financial services and critical infrastructure sectors.

As organisations respond to this shift, a recurring question surfaces: Is operational resilience simply a rebranding of business continuity, or does it represent something fundamentally different?

This question matters. Treating operational resilience and business continuity as interchangeable concepts risks blurring accountability, duplicating controls, and weakening an organisation’s ability to withstand severe disruption.

While the two disciplines are closely related and highly interdependent, they are not the same. Each serves a distinct purpose, operates at a different level of abstraction, and answers a different set of management questions.

This chapter explains why operational resilience is distinct from business continuity, clarifies the unique value each discipline provides, and demonstrates why both remain essential for organisations seeking to sustain critical services under stress.

Operational Resilience: Defining What Must Continue

Operational resilience is fundamentally outcome-driven. It focuses on the organisation’s ability to continue delivering important business services during severe but plausible disruptions. The emphasis is not on internal processes or recovery actions, but on customer, market, and societal outcomes.

At its core, operational resilience asks:

• Which services are critical to customers and financial stability?

• What level of disruption is tolerable before harm becomes unacceptable?

• Under what extreme scenarios must these services continue?

Key characteristics of operational resilience include:

• Impact tolerances that define the maximum acceptable disruption to an important business service

• Service Mapping (Dependencies, Processes and Resources) across people, processes, technology, data, facilities, and third parties

• Severe but plausible scenarios designed to test the organisation’s ability to remain within tolerance

• Alignment with the organisation’s risk appetite and risk tolerance

Operational resilience is therefore proactive and strategic. It sets the design expectations for the organisation's resilience, well before an incident occurs. It establishes what must be protected and why it matters.

Business Continuity: Enabling Response and Recovery

Business continuity management (BCM), by contrast, is execution-focused. It concentrates on how the organisation prepares for, responds to, and recovers from disruptions once they occur.

The challenge is that BCM practitioners have been performing some operational resilience roles, and these have now been carved out as operational resilience rather than BCM.  BCM does more than execution-focused.  The landscape for BCM is now shared further with the Operational Risk and the Third Party Risk Management professionals, and that is where the confusion starts with the "turf fighting."

Business continuity answers a different set of questions:

• How do we respond when a disruption happens?

• Who does what, when, and how?

• How do we recover systems, processes, and resources within agreed timeframes?

Core elements of business continuity include:

• Business impact analysis (BIA) to prioritise activities and resources

• BC strategies (BCS) and BC plans (PD) for people, premises, technology, and suppliers

• Crisis management (CM) and communication (CC) structures

• Tests and Exercises (TE) to validate response and recovery capability

BCM is inherently action-oriented. It translates resilience objectives into practical arrangements that can be activated under pressure. While operational resilience defines the destination, business continuity provides the route.

Why the Confusion Exists

The confusion between operational resilience and business continuity often arises because both disciplines engage with similar components, such as:

• Critical services or processes

• Assets and dependencies

• Third-party providers

• Scenarios and testing

Without clear ownership, organisations may find both functions attempting to control the same activities, leading to duplication, inconsistent assumptions, and governance gaps.

The distinction becomes clearer when responsibility is deliberately separated:

• Operational resilience encompasses impact tolerances, identification of critical business services, scenario severity, and lessons learned at the service-outcome level.

• Business continuity owns response structures, recovery playbooks, communication protocols, and execution of exercises.

Scenario testing provides a natural bridge between the two. Scenarios should be designed through an operational resilience lens, reflecting risk appetite and tolerance, but executed using business continuity capabilities.

Why Both Disciplines Still Matter

Operational resilience without business continuity risks becoming theoretical, with well-defined tolerances but no practical means of recovery. Business continuity without operational resilience risks being tactical and inward-looking, optimising recovery of internal processes without sufficient regard for customer harm or systemic impact.

Together, they form a complementary system:

• Operational resilience ensures the organisation is designed to withstand disruption

• Business continuity ensures the organisation can respond and recover effectively

In regulated sectors, this alignment is no longer optional. Regulators increasingly expect organisations to demonstrate both resilience by design and resilience in execution, supported by clear governance and accountability.

Summing Up ...

The debate is not about choosing between operational resilience and business continuity, nor about collapsing them into a single function. The real challenge lies in clarifying purpose, ownership, and integration.

Operational resilience defines what must continue and within what tolerance. Business continuity refers to how an organisation responds and recovers when disruption occurs.

When each discipline is clearly understood and properly aligned, organisations are better equipped to protect customers, maintain trust, and sustain critical services in an increasingly uncertain operating environment.

Both matter. And together, they form the foundation of true organisational resilience.