In many organisations business resilience is still viewed as a technical necessity, with the core objective of recovering quickly when things fail while minimising disruption. It’s a deeply embedded perspective, with recent research from Six Degrees’ Business Resilience Index 2026 revealing that nearly three-quarters of technology and security leaders reference security when defining what resilience means to them.
The Business Resilience Index study, based on research with 600 senior UK IT and security leaders, serves as a benchmark for understanding organisational resilience. It also lays the groundwork for something more practical: a self-scoring tool that enables businesses to assess their own resilience profile, compare it against peers, and pinpoint areas for improvement.
In today’s landscape, resilience encompasses much more than operational continuity; it includes supply chain and third-party dependencies, regulatory changes, economic volatility, and the increasing complexity of technology. In fact, 91% of the surveyed leaders reported learning something new when introduced to this broader definition of resilience.
There is also a widespread disconnect between the operational work being carried out by technology teams and how resilience is understood at the leadership level. While 97% of respondents said strong leadership and governance would improve resilience, board-level commitment ranked only 10th among factors associated with its delivery.
This trend also has important implications for the wider technology ecosystem, particularly for the suppliers and partners who advise clients on the strategies and solutions needed to address their resilience objectives. For example, what does this broader kind of resilience look like in practice, and what help do organisations need to deliver it?
The resilience gap
When resilience is assessed businesses will fall into one of the following maturity levels, identified by the Business Resilience Index: At the least sophisticated end of the scale, they can be ‘at risk’ and vulnerable to disruption with limited controls or planning in place. Slightly more advanced are those at the ‘reactive’ level, who can respond to issues but can’t demonstrate consistent foresight or proactivity.
The middle ground is a position of ‘stability’. These organisations are capable of managing known risks, but lack agility or future readiness. Next, there is the ‘agile’ classification, in which a flexible, responsive approach to resilience is a product of growing maturity. And finally, the most advanced are those who have reached the ‘strategically resilient’ phase, with embedded governance, scalability, and innovation driving long-term growth.
Becoming more resilient is now less about the narrow impact of point solutions and services and more about how well five key pillars integrate across the entire organisation. These are continuity, security, scalability, efficiency, and innovation, and they work most effectively when aligned across the organisation, reinforcing each other so that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
More specifically:
- Continuity: maintaining operations during disruption, ensuring critical services remain available if systems fail.
- Security: addresses preparedness against internal and external threats across increasingly complex digital environments.
- Scalability: the ability of infrastructure and services to expand or contract as operational demands change.
- Efficiency: the use of automation and resource management to support operational performance and reduce friction during disruption.
- Innovation: ensuring resilience strategies continue to evolve, enabling organisations to adapt their operating models as risks and opportunities change.
When these capabilities operate in isolation, resilience is likely to keep organisations at the lower end of the performance spectrum, with the potential for serious issues in the event of an incident. When they are aligned across infrastructure and governance, however, they reinforce each other and support a more adaptable operating environment.
Technology priorities
For technology partners, there are some important priorities to address when helping customers plan their resilience roadmap and investment strategy. For example, the Six Degrees research shows that automation and AI are now the most important drivers of resilience, ranking above incident response, recovery and continuity planning.
Many organisations also report that existing resilience services can only scale with constraints or delay, meaning infrastructure can quickly become a limiting factor during disruption or sudden changes in demand. Ensuring platforms and services can adapt quickly to operational pressure is therefore an increasingly important focus for organisations seeking to strengthen their posture.
The underlying point across all of these challenges and opportunities is that the nature of resilience is changing at a fundamental level. More organisations understand the need for change and will look to their trusted advisors to find the best way forward. Those who do will be ideally placed to tackle any resilience problems head-on.
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