Each year, Forrester and the Disaster Recovery Journal (DRJ) team up to launch a study examining resilience. We survey people on different topics in resilience such as disaster recovery, but this time, the focus is solely on business resilience, including business continuity and operational resilience. No matter whether your program’s goals are to create business continuity plans and test them, to build operational resilience, or to cross-functionally maintain business operations despite disruptions, this survey is for you!
In the last survey two years ago, we shifted our focus not only on business continuity practices but also on the adoption of operational resilience mandates. We found that:
- Unfortunately, the testing situation is largely unchanged since 2008. For all test types, most organizations only test once per year with plan walkthroughs and tabletop exercises, and as tests become more extensive, test frequency declines — 41% of respondents said that they never performed a full simulation.
- Nine percent of respondents were already compliant with the EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act.
- IT failures had an outsized effect on disruptions, with 59% of respondents reporting an IT failure that caused an invocation.
- The top lessons learned from invocations had a tie, with 33% of respondents saying that execution did not adequately address organizationwide communication and collaboration and that decision-makers did not have a central dashboard that included specifics about the incident.
This time around, we are not only interested in these same trends but also in how AI is helping you be more successful and, alternatively, how it is driving the invocation of plans. If you are a business resilience decision-maker or influencer at your organization, please take 20 minutes to complete the survey here.
Once the survey is complete, the DRJ will have a summary of the results on its site. For Forrester clients, the survey results will be examined in depth in reports that will publish in the next few quarters. All the results are anonymous. If you’d like to receive a complimentary Forrester report (the upcoming “The State Of Resilience, 2026”), you can submit your email address; we won’t use it for any other purpose.
Take the survey, receive a free report, and help us and the DRJ get a pulse on business resilience!
