Operational Resilience and Cyber Readiness: Identifying the Capability Gaps That Undermine Service Continuity

Why resilience capability gaps have become a strategy validation issue

Operational resilience is no longer a specialist discipline confined to business continuity planning. Supervisors increasingly frame it as an outcome the board and senior management must set, govern, and evidence, including the ability to continue delivering important business services through disruption. This reframes strategic ambition: modernization roadmaps, cloud migration plans, and automation programs are only credible if the institution can demonstrate that resilience and cyber controls evolve at least as quickly as the operating model and technology stack.

The hard part is not articulating resilience intent but translating it into an enterprise capability that is measurable, testable, and executable across functions. Banks frequently discover that their most material exposures are not novel threats but structural gaps: incomplete visibility of critical dependencies, resilience responsibilities split across silos, and legacy technology that constrains both change velocity and control effectiveness.

Where the most material resilience and cyber capability gaps typically sit

Third-party and cloud dependency management beyond vendor due diligence

Reliance on third parties and cloud service providers changes the resilience control problem from managing a set of vendors to governing an extended service supply chain. The capability gap is often end-to-end visibility: institutions may know their direct suppliers but struggle to map fourth parties, shared infrastructure dependencies, and concentration risk that can turn a localized incident into a systemic service outage.

Contracting and oversight frequently lag operational reality. Resilience expectations require more than standard service-level language; they demand clarity on incident notification, testing participation, data access for assurance, and enforceable remediation obligations. When these elements are weak or inconsistent across suppliers, the bank’s ability to demonstrate control effectiveness becomes dependent on supplier goodwill rather than governed assurance.

Legacy technology as a resilience constraint, not just a modernization tax

Legacy core platforms and brittle integration patterns can make resilient operations expensive and slow to improve. They may limit the institution’s ability to segment environments, automate failover, deploy patches rapidly, and produce reliable telemetry during incidents. The strategic consequence is that resilience becomes structurally bounded: the bank can set ambitious availability objectives, but the underlying architecture cannot deliver them without disproportionate complexity, creating hidden operational debt.

Legacy dependence also amplifies cyber exposure. When systems cannot be updated or instrumented effectively, security controls migrate to compensating layers that are harder to govern and easier to misconfigure. Executives should therefore treat legacy constraints as a first-order factor in resilience and cyber prioritization rather than a background modernization narrative.

Siloed governance that prevents integrated, outcome-driven resilience management

Many institutions still organize resilience responsibilities across IT, risk, security, and business continuity as parallel disciplines, each with its own tooling, metrics, and reporting cadence. This creates an accountability gap precisely where supervisors and boards expect integration: the outcomes experienced by customers and markets depend on the interplay of technology, people, process, and third parties, not on the performance of any single function.

A common failure mode is inconsistent definitions. If “resilience” means recovery time to one function, control compliance to another, and crisis communications readiness to a third, the organization can appear well-managed while remaining operationally fragile. Mature governance aligns these perspectives around important business services, defined tolerances, and a shared evidence model.

Talent and skills shortages as an amplifier of operational risk

Resilience and cyber capabilities increasingly rely on automation, continuous monitoring, and rapid response disciplines. Skill gaps can convert manageable incidents into prolonged disruptions when teams cannot interpret telemetry, execute containment steps, or coordinate recovery across hybrid environments. The capability gap is not only the availability of specialists; it is the digital literacy of the broader operating model, including front-line operations, change teams, and risk partners who must act decisively under pressure.

Where automation and AI-enabled tools are introduced, banks must also ensure that staff understand how to supervise these systems, validate outputs, and manage model-driven workflows during abnormal conditions. Otherwise, automation can create a false sense of control that collapses during stress.

Testing and scenario planning that does not prove outcomes

Many firms test components of resilience, but fewer conduct rigorous, outcome-based scenario testing that validates the end-to-end delivery of important services under severe but plausible disruption. The gap is often the realism of scenarios and the completeness of the test surface: exercises may exclude third parties, assume ideal staffing, or avoid the hardest dependencies such as identity services, data replication, and core payment processing.

Supervisory expectations increasingly focus on evidence: whether testing demonstrates the ability to remain within impact tolerances, whether lessons translate into funded remediation, and whether the institution can repeat the outcome reliably. This elevates scenario testing from a compliance task to a strategy validation mechanism.

Service mapping and data foundations that are insufficient for prioritization

Institutions commonly struggle to map critical business functions and their underlying resources, interconnections, and dependencies, including data flows, people, facilities, and technology components. Without credible mapping, prioritization becomes political and reactive: investment decisions reflect recent incidents or the loudest stakeholders rather than the services with the highest systemic importance and lowest tolerance for disruption.

Weak mapping also undermines incident response. If teams cannot quickly determine which services, customers, and obligations are affected, they cannot execute containment and recovery steps with confidence, and they cannot communicate impact accurately to management, customers, and supervisors.

How regulatory focus changes the executive risk calculus

Regulators have moved from encouraging resilience improvements to setting explicit expectations around governance, mapping, testing, and accountability. Frameworks such as the EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act and the UK operational resilience regime reinforce that resilience is an executive and board responsibility, requiring demonstrable oversight of third-party risk, technology controls, and the ability to deliver important services within tolerance through disruption.

The practical implication is that resilience cannot be deferred until after major transformations. Cloud adoption, platform modernization, and digital expansion increase the number of dependencies and potential failure modes. If resilience capabilities do not mature in parallel, the institution accumulates “resilience debt” that surfaces during incidents, audits, and supervisory engagement, often with limited tolerance for remediation timelines.

Second-order effects executives should anticipate when addressing gaps

Resilience trade-offs become visible in cost, speed, and risk appetite

Improving resilience is not simply a matter of adding controls. It often forces explicit trade-offs between speed of change and stability, between standardization and local optimization, and between centralized governance and business autonomy. Banks that do not surface these trade-offs early may see resilience work stall in delivery friction, or worse, see control requirements diluted to maintain program velocity.

Third-party remediation can shift bargaining power and operating assumptions

When resilience requirements are strengthened in contracts and oversight, third parties may require changes in commercial terms, implementation timelines, or access boundaries. This can disrupt program plans that assume vendors will align automatically with the bank’s internal risk posture. Mature institutions anticipate this by prioritizing dependencies that create the greatest concentration risk and by embedding resilience obligations into sourcing and architecture decisions from the outset.

Integrated risk management demands operating model change, not just tooling

Integrated, technology-driven risk management can support a “resilience by design” posture, but only if ownership, decision rights, and evidence expectations are aligned. If the institution adds new monitoring platforms without resolving governance ambiguity, it increases noise rather than insight. The key maturity indicator is whether resilience metrics and evidence are used consistently in change approval, architectural decisions, and executive reporting.

From gap identification to credible prioritization

Operational resilience capability gaps are best treated as constraints on strategy, not as downstream remediation tasks. A bank can validate strategic ambition by testing whether it has: (1) defensible visibility of critical service dependencies across the supply chain, (2) architectural capacity to deliver resilient operations in hybrid environments, (3) governance that integrates technology, risk, and business outcomes, (4) skills and operating coverage to respond under pressure, and (5) outcome-based testing that proves impact tolerances can be met.

Prioritization becomes clearer when gaps are framed by service impact and dependency criticality rather than by function. For example, a third-party observability gap may be more urgent than an internal process gap if the service depends on external components that cannot be tested or assured. Likewise, legacy platform constraints may dominate resilience outcomes even when cybersecurity tooling appears mature. This is where leadership benefits from a consistent maturity lens that translates qualitative concerns into sequenced capability work with measurable outcomes.

Strategy validation and prioritization through identifying resilience capability gaps

Because resilience and cyber readiness are cross-cutting, banks often assess them through fragmented initiatives: vendor risk remediation, data mapping projects, security tooling upgrades, and isolated testing programs. A structured maturity assessment helps unify these efforts by evaluating whether the institution’s capabilities are sufficient to support strategic ambitions without increasing the likelihood or impact of disruption.

Used in governance, an assessment provides a defensible basis to answer a board-level question: is the bank’s operating model and technology stack resilient enough to sustain planned change while meeting supervisory expectations for important services, third-party oversight, and scenario testing evidence. Within this intent, the DUNNIXER Digital Maturity Assessment supports executives in comparing current capabilities against the demands implied by their strategy, surfacing the most material resilience and cyber gaps across technology, data, controls, governance, and operating model readiness, and improving decision confidence in prioritization and sequencing.

Reviewed by

Ahmed Abbas

The Founder & CEO of DUNNIXER and a former IBM Executive Architect with 26+ years in IT strategy and solution architecture. He has led architecture teams across the Middle East & Africa and globally, and also served as a Strategy Director (contract) at EY-Parthenon. Ahmed is an inventor with multiple US patents and an IBM-published author, and he works with CIOs, CDOs, CTOs, and Heads of Digital to replace conflicting transformation narratives with an evidence-based digital maturity baseline, peer benchmark, and prioritized 12–18 month roadmap—delivered consulting-led and platform-powered for repeatability and speed to decision, including an executive/board-ready readout. He writes about digital maturity, benchmarking, application portfolio rationalization, and how leaders prioritize digital and AI investments.