• May 18, 2026May 18, 2026
• Betterleg Studios

Building Operational Resilience in 2026: Incident Response, Disaster Recovery & Security Posture

A practical guide for security and operations leaders navigating today’s risk landscape.

The threat landscape in our community has shifted dramatically in the past 12 months. What were theoretical risk management scenarios a year ago have, for some organizations, become real incidents — ransomware campaigns, supply chain disruptions, and regulatory shockwaves — that no business continuity plan fully anticipated.

The organizations that weathered these events best built genuine operational resilience. They had teams that knew what to do when something went wrong, systems and data designed to recover, and operations capable of continuing under pressure.

As you think about your resilience posture in 2026, this guide can help. We cover the three pillars of operational resilience, and how to strengthen each one:

• people,
• systems, and
• operations.

What Operational Resilience Looks Like in 2026

A resilient organization is one that can survive a security incident. Whether it’s a breach of the company network, a successful ransomware campaign, or a critical third-party failure, a resilient organization is one that can respond with a coordinated plan and a team that has prepared for exactly this day.

Importantly, operational resilience does not mean being 100% immune to compromise. That’s an increasingly impractical (and expensive) goal. Instead, resilience means:

• Having a team that is prepared and reachable when an incident occurs
• Having systems and data that are recoverable from inadvertent or malicious loss
• Having operations that can withstand and recover from interruption

Organizations that score highly on these three dimensions consistently outperform those focused purely on prevention. Prevention matters, but resilience is what keeps the lights on.

Building Your Incident Response Team

Operational resilience starts with people. Specifically, it starts with identifying the right people to form your incident response team before an incident occurs. When something goes wrong is not the time to be figuring out who’s responsible for what.

At a minimum, your incident response team should include:

• IT and engineering leads to identify, investigate, and contain what has gone wrong
• Finance and HR representatives to coordinate the business and operational side of the response
• Internal communications lead — someone who knows how to reach the broader organization quickly and clearly, outside of IT channels
• External communications lead — someone prepared to communicate with customers, press, and the general public during an active incident
• Outside advisors on retainer — cybersecurity insurance provider, legal counsel, and PR firm for the most serious incidents

One often-overlooked step: run a tabletop exercise with this team at least once a year. A tabletop exercise simulates an incident scenario in a low-stakes environment so your team can identify gaps before they matter. Many organizations discover mid-exercise that their incident response plan hasn’t been updated since the last team restructure, or that two people assumed someone else owned a critical step.

Disaster Recovery and Data Backup: Protecting Critical Systems

Your team likely already has a mental list of the systems and data most critical to your operations. The first step toward a stronger disaster recovery posture is getting that list out of people’s heads and into a formal business continuity or disaster recovery plan.

Once documented, those systems and their associated data need to be backed up — and not just in one location. Wedding photographers have a saying: a photo isn’t a photo yet until it’s in three places — their camera, their computer, and some kind of backup. Your organization’s critical data should follow the same logic: on-site, off-site, and in a cloud or secondary backup. The 3-2-1 backup rule (three copies, two different media types, one off-site) remains the gold standard.

Backups alone aren’t enough, though. The critical question is: can you recover from them? Many organizations discover during an incident that their backups are incomplete, outdated, or in a format they can’t restore quickly under pressure. Your disaster recovery plan should include:

• Scheduled backup testing including an actual restore of backups in a test environment, not just checking that files exist
• Documented recovery time objectives (RTOs) to determine how long the organization can tolerate being without each critical system
• Documented recovery point objectives (RPOs) to get a sense of how much data loss would occur vs. what is acceptable, and whether backup frequency is aligned to what different teams need

These aren’t one-time exercises. Backup testing and RTO/RPO reviews should be part of your regular operational cadence.

Operational Resilience: Business Continuity Under Pressure

The third pillar is operations: the ability to keep delivering your products and services even when something has gone seriously wrong. For many teams, the last real test of this was the COVID pandemic. The lessons varied — some people discovered they didn’t know their home Wi-Fi password; others found they needed physical building access for critical printing or mailing operations that no one had thought to digitize.

Building operational resilience means systematically mapping the facilities, service providers, and business partners required to deliver your core operations and thinking through what happens if each one is unavailable.

Practical steps:

• Document single points of failure in your supply chain and service provider stack
• Identify and vet alternative providers before you need them
• Test remote-work capabilities regularly, not just during onboarding
• Hold periodic business continuity discussions with department leads in addition to IT

One way to go through this exercise, and you can even make it fun, is to ask for each critical business process: “What would we do if this was unavailable for 24 hours? For a week?” The answers often reveal gaps that are straightforward to close proactively but painful to discover mid-incident.

Building Resilience Is a Practice, Not a Project

Operational resilience is not a one-time implementation. It is an ongoing discipline built into the way your organization runs. The most resilient organizations don’t treat disaster recovery testing as a checkbox — they treat it as muscle memory.

That means:

• Keeping admin credentials and access lists current as your team changes
• Reviewing recovery time objectives with service providers at least annually
• Ensuring that critical data isn’t siloed on a single person’s device or account
• Running tabletop exercises to stress-test your incident response team before a real incident forces the test

While some activities have natural ceremony — an annual disaster recovery drill, a semi-annual business continuity review — the more valuable resilience-building happens at a lower level, more frequently, and less formally.

The organizations in our community that came through the past year’s incidents in the best shape weren’t those with the largest security budgets. They were the ones who had done the unglamorous work: documented their critical systems, tested their backups, and made sure their incident response team had practiced together.