EY Operational Resilience

Re-imagining business service continuity powered by ServiceNow

Many factors affect service delivery — technology, facilities, people and more. In isolation, any one of these factors may not result in a critical service failure, but in aggregate, they might.

There are many trends exposing business services to risks and driving the need for greater operational resiliency, including: 

• Customers and market participants have increasingly higher expectations for uninterrupted services — availability, reliability, scalability and security are fundamental to their experience.
• Organizations need resilience against business disruptions including cyberattacks, natural disasters, pandemics and critical service provider failures.
• Global regulators have issued guidance that consolidates multiple resilience-related efforts into their requirements. Individual countries have different regulations, and organizations with operations in multiple countries need to be able to accommodate these varying requirements.
• Emerging cloud strategies are forcing a re-evaluation of resilience strategies, tools and techniques.
• Many institutions’ resilience strategies and tools are archaic — they’re examining them to determine whether to repurpose what they have or invest in new vendor technologies.

Challenges to meeting those needs include: 

• Business, operations and technology all need to be aligned — traditionally business continuity planning, data recovery and crisis management functions all work in silos, and while each individually might be good, true resiliency requires all three operating in coordination.
• Many current resilience and business continuity plans are technology-based, focusing on systems and tools instead of an end-to-end understanding of the technologies, suppliers, facilities and people requirements needed to support critical business services.
• Many institutions’ resilience monitoring approaches are inconsistent in how they define and assess service health and enable decision-making.
• Several technology tools for resilience exist with varying strengths, but no one tool has it all — organizations are forced to decide which features are the most important to them.
• Many resilience offerings lack the robust workflow and orchestration capabilities required to prevent, detect and remediate disruptions — in addition to building frameworks and gathering data, organizations are seeking levers that enable them to make informed decisions to recover and resume critical business services.

How EY teams can help

EY Operational Resilience, powered by ServiceNow, ingests input from a wide range of sources (including existing monitors, sensors and manual inputs) and intelligently aggregates information to enable an early warning system, allowing preventative actions to minimize the probability of service disruptions. 

With workflow enabled from ServiceNow and integration with operations tools and response protocols, the offering can quickly identify and automate appropriate prevention/recovery actions and bring together the right people so that the potential impacts of service failures can be managed and normal service levels maintained.

Key features

Service disruption management and recovery

• Analyze incidents (facilities, people, suppliers, technology, etc.) and their impact
• Response and recovery decision support
• Monitor disruption incident trends

Critical business service monitoring

• Help manage service assets in real time
• Leverage and automate business service continuity plans
• Scenario analysis and testing

Decision and workflow support

• Real-time, multi-channel notifications and alerts
• Organize and automate data

Disruptive events are inevitable, but disrupted services need not be. EY is helping organizations reimagine business service continuity with Operational Resilience powered by ServiceNow, providing the tools to respond quickly to — or even avoid — catastrophic failure events and recover service delivery as quickly as possible.