Introducing the Business Resilience Index – What It Is and Why It Matters

Resilience: Redefined

Resilience has traditionally been framed in narrow, defensive terms: disaster recovery, business continuity plans, or cyber security controls. While these remain critical, they no longer tell the full story.

The Business Resilience Index introduces a broader, more modern definition:

Business resilience is a business’ ability to maintain stability and embrace opportunity by ensuring its people, processes, and technology can anticipate and respond effectively to both threats and opportunities in today’s evolving operating landscape.

This reframing is both important and timely. Research underpinning the Index found that 91% of senior IT and security leaders learned something new simply by reading this definition – a clear signal that resilience is a live, evolving conversation.

Crucially, this definition recognises that resilience is not just about protection; it is about progression. Organisations that focus solely on avoiding failure risk standing still, or worse, falling behind. True resilience enables businesses to move faster, scale faster, recover faster, and ultimately turn potential disruption into competitive advantage.

The Business Resilience Index and How It Works

The Business Resilience Index is a benchmarking framework built on independent research with 600 senior IT and security leaders across six UK sectors, supported by in-depth C-suite interviews. It provides an objective way for organisations to assess their current resilience posture and identify where to focus next.

At its core are five pillars of business resilience:

• Continuity – the ability to maintain operations through disruption
• Security – preparedness against internal and external threats
• Scalability – flexibility to respond to changing demand
• Efficiency – effective use of automation and resources
• Innovation – capacity to evolve and stay ahead of future risks

Together, these pillars reflect how people think, how processes operate, and how technology is deployed across the organisation.

The Index also introduces a five-tier maturity model, allowing businesses to benchmark their resilience level:

• At Risk – vulnerable to disruption with limited controls
• Reactive – able to respond, but lacking foresight
• Stable – well controlled, but slow to adapt
• Agile – flexible, automated, and responsive
• Strategically Resilient – resilience embedded by design, driving long-term growth

This combination of pillars and maturity tiers gives organisations a clear, intuitive view of where they stand today – and what progress looks like in practice.

The Need for Resilience as a Strategic Imperative

One of the most striking findings from the research is the disconnect between where resilience is delivered and where it is owned. Day to day, resilience is often driven by IT and security teams. Strategically, however, it remains poorly understood at board level.

The Business Resilience Index is designed to prompt different conversations – especially in the boardroom. Rather than treating resilience as a technical or operational issue, the Index reframes it as a strategic, commercial imperative tied directly to growth, competitiveness, cost efficiency, and customer experience.

In fact, when asked what would most improve resilience, respondents ranked strong leadership and governance above any technical measure. Yet board-level commitment ranked far lower in practice – highlighting a critical gap the Index aims to close.

By providing a common language and objective benchmarks, the Business Resilience Index helps boards and executive teams engage meaningfully with resilience: understanding trade-offs, prioritising investment, and aligning resilience initiatives with long-term business strategy.

Turning Insight into Action

The Business Resilience Index is more than a research report. It is a practical framework designed to help organisations understand their true resilience, benchmark against peers, and identify where to focus investment and action.

In a world where disruption is constant, resilience can no longer be assumed – it must be measured, owned, and embedded by design. Businesses that do this will not only withstand disruption, but move faster, adapt quicker, and unlock new opportunities with confidence.

To explore the findings in full and understand what resilience really looks like in 2026, download and read the Business Resilience Index today.