Consulting has been all about efficiency for most of my 25….ok, maybe 30 years in the business. Process improvement, reducing “slack,” automate, offshoring and outsourcing are all terms I’m sure that you are familiar with no matter your age. What about resiliency?

Resiliency is nothing new.
Not in the world of information security and IT where we have processes for High Availability (HA), Business Continuity Process (BCP) and Disaster Recovery (DR). We’re still so efficient that we can’t even say the whole term. We put a glossary in most of our documentation so that the business personnel and management understand that documentation. That is a concession to resiliency. Extra work is done on our end to explain to someone else so they can understand what we did or what we do.

Resilience is not efficient, but it does provide strength. Strength to keep the business open and to meet our commitment to our customers despite a cyber-attack. That strength usually comes at the cost of additional, redundant capacity. Think about a separate “hot” site that is geographically isolated from your organization’s primary operations. It costs a great deal to provide that additional strength.

The last few weeks have been testing the resiliency of our nation as we re-think the efficiency of the globalized business model. Many questions will haunt us all for a long time after we get past this phase of the crisis and define our new normal. Such as:

• Does it make sense to source 80% of our antibiotics from China?
• Why is our health care supply chain so fragile?
• How do we prepare for the next time? What do we expect from our government? What do we expect from our employers?

At Cirrus Cybersecurity Group, we are committed to quality for our clients while providing the best work experience for our professionals. As a firm, we’re maintaining those commitments and looking ahead to a return to “business” since “the as usual” part is never coming back.

It’s easy to get depressed, but I’m looking past this part now and thinking about how we will change to be more resilient as a firm in the future to serve our clients, partners and employees.

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