If your business lost several systems at once, would the recovery order reflect what your customers need most?
In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I speak with Mike Campbell, CEO of Fusion Risk Management, about operational resilience and the connections that can turn one disruption into a wider business problem. We discuss why application recovery, supplier continuity, employee knowledge and customer service need to be understood together when leaders decide what to restore first.
Mike shares an example involving an unnamed retailer whose existing IT recovery plans followed a logical technical sequence. During a demonstration using those plans, he says the business identified a different priority: restoring its online presence before concentrating resources on stores that had some manual alternatives. The lesson is about the assumptions inside the plan. This was a planning example, rather than evidence of a measured recovery during an actual outage.
What interested me was the distance between knowing which applications sit on a server and knowing which business activities depend on them. That connection affects how teams judge financial impact, customer consequences and the order in which work should happen. It also explains why operational resilience is a boardroom discussion, with choices about suppliers, investment and acceptable disruption sitting alongside technical decisions.
We consider the role of simulation and testing across different scenarios. Mike describes how Fusion's platform can help teams compare variations and identify recurring weaknesses. Those findings depend on the information and assumptions behind the model, and the conversation doesn't establish that a simulation can guarantee what will happen in a real incident. It does offer a useful way to question whether a single rehearsal has covered enough possibilities.
There is also a very practical communications example. If the usual email service becomes unavailable, teams need a way to coordinate that doesn't depend on the same failed services. Mike argues that deciding this while normal communications still work is much easier than trying to assemble an alternative during disruption.
Finally, we discuss people as potential single points of failure and the decisions involved in relying on one supplier. Resilience becomes something leaders consider when designing the business, supported by testing and an understanding of the consequences of different choices. Please share your thoughts with me. Which dependency would you examine first to find out whether your recovery plan matches the business your customers rely on?