The importance of understanding your minimum viable operations
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Building operational resilience. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Amid the Cold War, the possibility of a nuclear attack was deeply feared, yet at the same time, weirdly unimaginable. The stark terror of nuclear disaster persisted for years, highlighted in the 1984 BBC drama film “Threads”.
The film explored the hypothetical event of a nuclear bomb being dropped on a British city, and the societal breakdown that followed. People were horrified by the film, and it showcased everyone’s deepest and darkest fears around nuclear fallout. Fast-forward nearly 40 years, and while nuclear fear still abounds, cybersecurity catastrophe is the new background dread – and in July 2024 we received our first major warning sign.
The CrowdStrike outage highlighted the widespread chaos that could ensue if millions of computers crashed simultaneously – reminding many people of the fear instilled during the Y2K bug. Now imagine this chaos, but instead of a software update gone wrong, it’s a cybercriminal targeting critical systems within a power station, resulting in a city losing power for a week. Or perhaps a vulnerability in a piece of fintech software triggering a 2008-style financial meltdown.
Whilst such an event may be difficult to envisage, the interconnectedness of modern systems makes it a real possibility. Achieving operational resilience must be the goal and this means prioritizing keeping business-critical functions running in the event of a serious incident. But to do so organizations first need to understand their minimum viable operation (MVO).