Control Risks survey identifies a disconnect between perceived and actual resilience in many enterprises

• Print

Details

Published: Thursday, 12 November 2015 09:41

Control Risks has published the results of its recent ‘State of Enterprise Resilience’ survey. Defining resilience as the ability of an organization to assess, anticipate, mitigate, and recover from disruptive events, the survey assessed the degree to which the concept of resilience has gained currency and become embedded within organizations.

Key findings include:

• There is a discrepancy between business’ perceived resilience and their actual resilience. 86 percent of surveyed businesses report suffering some form of disruption in the past five years, with 28 percent of respondents reporting more than seven disruptive events. This is in spite of 68 percent of businesses claiming to monitor and analyse risk proactively. This discrepancy costs: of the businesses that have suffered disruption, 37 percent report that those events led to financial losses of more than £1 million.
• Companies are more worried about long-term reputational damage than short-term financial loss. 72.7 percent of respondents see reputational damage as the impact of most concern to their business in the event of a disruption – considerable more than reduced revenue (50.0 percent), loss of new business opportunities (37.9 percent) or reduced shareholder value (34.8 percent).
• Political instability is seen as the principal external threat. 62 percent of respondents indicated that they were mostly concerned about both direct political risks to their business and the impact of political instability on the broader security environment – rated considerably higher than macroeconomic uncertainty (34.8 percent).
• Resilience is hard – but not impossible – to achieve. Ways for companies to become more resilient include engaging in higher quality risk analysis; allocating responsibility for monitoring (and responding to) risk clearly and authoritatively; and rigorously vetting and managing third-party relationships.