Operational Resilience

Building Strength in a Disrupted World

The frequency and complexity of operational disruptions are rising, making resilience a strategic imperative. Regulatory expectations and market pressures demand that firms can withstand shocks, recover quickly, and adapt their practices to prevent future incidents.

The ability to foresee, respond to, and learn from disruptions is now essential for protecting reputation, maintaining stakeholder confidence, and ensuring business continuity.

Protiviti’s Operational Resilience practice delivers proven, end-to-end solutions that help clients build robust programs, meet regulatory requirements, and stay ahead of emerging risks.

Connect with Our Experts

SIFMA's Quantum Dawn

SIFMA's Quantum Dawn, a premier crisis simulation series for financial institutions, in coordination with Protiviti was completed in November. Connect with our team ahead of the after-action report launch.

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Our Operational Resilience Capabilities

We build on your existing business continuity, IT disaster recovery, and cyber incident response capabilities, bringing deep expertise across business, technology, cyber, and third‑party resilience.

Gap Assessment & Roadmap

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  • Identify regulatory and operational gaps using proprietary diagnostics
  • Deliver prioritized roadmap for resilience improvements
  • Enable measurable progress against industry benchmarks
  • Provide independent program assurance to validate current practices against foundational elements
     
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Business Continuity & Resilience

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  • Align continuity planning with strategic objectives
  • Foster adaptability and flexible operations
  • Maintain critical services through robust governance and scenario testing
  • Formalize important business services and processes, including impact tolerances and front‑to‑back mapping
     
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Crisis Management & Communications

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  • Establish clear command and control protocols
  • Ensure timely, cohesive communications during disruptions
  • Protect brand reputation and stakeholder confidence
  • Design enterprise‑wide simulation exercises and playbooks to operationalize command, control, and communications
     
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Cyber & Technology Resilience

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  • Build defenses against evolving cyber threats
  • Implement disaster recovery and high-availability solutions
  • Sustain essential functions and minimize downtime
  • Align to leading frameworks (e.g., NIST, ISO 27001) and strengthen identity and access management and cloud/data center strategies
     
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Third-Party Risk Management

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  • Map critical dependencies and recovery capabilities
  • Assess and align third-party resilience with business needs
  • Reduce concentration and supply chain risks
  • Enhance supplier oversight, from strategy and framework design to assessment operations, implementation, and remediation 
     
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Integrated Scenario Testing

  • Simulate extreme-but-plausible events
  • Validate impact tolerances and recovery strategies
  • Drive continuous improvement through after-action reviews
  • Conduct enterprise‑wide scenario testing of extreme‑but‑plausible events impacting important business services
     

Our Operational Resilience Capabilities

Gap Assessment & Roadmap

  • Identify regulatory and operational gaps using proprietary diagnostics
  • Deliver prioritized roadmap for resilience improvements
  • Enable measurable progress against industry benchmarks
  • Provide independent program assurance to validate current practices against foundational elements
     
  • Align continuity planning with strategic objectives
  • Foster adaptability and flexible operations
  • Maintain critical services through robust governance and scenario testing
  • Formalize important business services and processes, including impact tolerances and front‑to‑back mapping
     
  • Establish clear command and control protocols
  • Ensure timely, cohesive communications during disruptions
  • Protect brand reputation and stakeholder confidence
  • Design enterprise‑wide simulation exercises and playbooks to operationalize command, control, and communications
     
  • Build defenses against evolving cyber threats
  • Implement disaster recovery and high-availability solutions
  • Sustain essential functions and minimize downtime
  • Align to leading frameworks (e.g., NIST, ISO 27001) and strengthen identity and access management and cloud/data center strategies
     
  • Map critical dependencies and recovery capabilities
  • Assess and align third-party resilience with business needs
  • Reduce concentration and supply chain risks
  • Enhance supplier oversight, from strategy and framework design to assessment operations, implementation, and remediation 
     
  • Simulate extreme-but-plausible events
  • Validate impact tolerances and recovery strategies
  • Drive continuous improvement through after-action reviews
  • Conduct enterprise‑wide scenario testing of extreme‑but‑plausible events impacting important business services
     

Case Studies

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Global Bank Gains Protiviti Support in Second-Line Risk Transformation

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Client Challenge

A regulatory agency informed a global banking institution that it must reform its second line of defense and embed operational resilience across the organization. The immediate need was to challenge, improve and document the second-line target operating model for the newly created resilience risk function.

The bank also required support and new insights to manage the target operating model rollout and deliver a communications strategy and internal and external engagement model.

Approach

Protiviti undertook the challenge by developing a project plan with workstreams and sub-workstreams, providing and experienced project management office (PMO) consultant to lead the team, recruiting its Operational Resilience Global Command Centre to provide regular briefings on regulatory expectations and peer insights to build into project strategy, and providing a clear handover highlighting potential roadblocks for future milestones and making remediation strategy.

Value Delivered

Protiviti developed a robust target operating model for the newly formed resilience risk function. The project team improved PMO and outputs meeting global transformation standards and methodology. Protiviti crafted a communications strategy and actively led outreach activities to maintain employee engagement and group buy-in. An engagement model was delivered for internal and external stakeholders in line with organizational redesign principles and an understanding of gaps and areas for improvement was collected in a risk and control library to manage resilience risk.

Protiviti Helps Client Define and Create New Technology Risk Framework

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Client Challenge

The EU arm of a large global asset management firm was struggling to meet the needs of a rapidly evolving business landscape with maintaining the grasp of key technology risks.

The firm recognized that the evolving technology landscape and emerging threats required a reevaluation of strategy and approach within the second line technology risk function. Management sought a capable partner to review and enhance their technology risk framework and operating model.

Approach

The firm asked Protiviti to review and design a new strategy to support future needs. Actions include working with the client’s first, second and third lines of defense to understand their business and how technology risk needed to respond, defining a strategic model and outlining a new risk operating model, and boosting the performance and design of technology risk governance, risk analysis, stakeholder engagement, control compliance, cybersecurity, risk tooling and other relevant areas of involvement.

Value

Protiviti helped the client design a future target operating for technology risk and articulated its vision across the organization. Efforts resulted in a clearly defined operating model with clear responsibilities for risk and control management. Production of a central suite of reports gave all stakeholders timely risk and control information and reduced the risk of duplicated efforts. Full integration of IT risk management and operational risk management enabled the business to effectively evaluate all technology risks impacting functions and business processes.

Protiviti Helps Global Financial Firm Conduct Rigorous Operational Resilience Assessment

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Challenge

A global financial institution was given a regulatory mandate to address operational resilience. Driven by the first line, it would assess planned initiatives against leading practices and enhance plans where necessary.

It would help draft regulatory responses, develop a go-forward strategy for the first line, including criticality framework, resilience operating model and testing approach, and work with the second line to develop metrics to monitor resilience and challenge first-line efforts.

Approach

A Protiviti team embedded across the delivery workstreams, partnered with the client to align combined efforts with leading practices and expectations from a global set of regulators and to conduct the following operations – perform a current state assessment of operational resilience efforts, benchmarking against regulatory expectations and leading practices and create a go-forward plan that accounted for work efforts to date and organizational/system limitations to address resilience concern.

Value Delivered

Protiviti helped create a global resilience strategy and operating model to align the client organization with the pending demands of regulators. Guiding principles, frameworks and industry and regulatory insights were provided, allowing for the advancement of resilience efforts and enhanced board and management reporting. A framework was created to address and validated the organization’s critical business services, and a customized strategy and approach were developed for resilience capability testing.

Premium Associate Memberships

Protiviti is a Premium Associate Member of SIFMA, AFME and ASIFMA, collectively part of the Global Financial Markets Association (GFMA). Protiviti actively engages with the associations, committees and working groups, sharing insights and expertise on crucial industry developments, speaking at conferences an events, and contributing to advocacy efforts for effective and resilience capital markets. Our membership allows us to contribute our deep understanding of the continued evolving and competitive financial services industry landscape.

Featured insights

Frequently Asked Questions

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What is Operational Resilience and why is it critical now?

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Operational Resilience is the ability to prevent, adapt to, respond to, recover from, and learn from operational disruptions. With increasing regulatory scrutiny and complex risk landscapes, demonstrating resilience is essential to protect reputation and ensure business continuity.

How does Protiviti help organizations achieve Operational Resilience?

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Protiviti provides comprehensive assessments, scenario testing, governance enhancements, and technology solutions tailored to your business, ensuring you meet regulatory requirements and industry best practices.

How does Operational Resilience differ from Business Continuity Management?

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While Business Continuity focuses on maintaining operations during disruptions, Operational Resilience expands this by integrating lessons learned, adapting to new threats, and aligning all aspects of cyber, third-party, and technology resilience.

What industries benefit most from Protiviti’s Operational Resilience services?

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Protiviti’s expertise spans financial services, manufacturing, energy, technology, and more – helping organizations of all sizes build resilience against today’s most pressing risks.

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