--- title: "What Is ResOps – and Why Cyber Resilience Needs It | Blog | Commvault" type: "BlogPosting" language: "en-US" url: "https://www.commvault.com/blogs/what-is-resops-why-cyber-resilience-needs-it" date: "2026-09-18T09:00:20-04:00" modified: "2026-09-17T16:05:41-04:00" description: "Resilience operations is the discipline that helps transform cyber resilience from an assumption into a proven business capability." image: "https://www.commvault.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Thumbnail_Blog-What-is-Resops-2026.png" authors: - name: "Michael Thelander" jobTitle: "Senior Director, Product Marketing, Commvault" breadcrumbs: - name: "Commvault Home" url: "https://www.commvault.com/" - name: "Blogs" url: "https://www.commvault.com/blogs" - name: "What is resops why cyber resilience needs it" --- # What Is ResOps – and Why Cyber Resilience Needs It ## Key Takeaways --- - ResOps is not a technology product. It’s a cross-functional operating discipline that helps drive organizational cyber resilience. - It complements backup, disaster recovery, cybersecurity, business continuity, and incident response by aligning these functions around end-to-end recovery outcomes. - ResOps focuses on critical services and business-defined impact tolerances, rather than isolated infrastructure components. - It relies on the continuous production of evidence, including tested recovery results, service resilience indicators, and an owned backlog of gaps. - ResOps is a continuous process. Neither making a plan nor running a successful one-time exercise are enough to establish lasting recovery capability. --- ## The New Resilience Challenge --- Most organizations invest in cybersecurity, backup, [disaster recovery](https://www.commvault.com/explore/what-is-disaster-recovery), and business continuity. Yet many executives still face three critical questions: Can we recover? How long will recovery take? And can we prove it? --- Part of the challenge is that responsibility for resilience is spread across teams that often operate in silos. Security manages threats. IT maintains systems. Backup and disaster recovery teams restore data and infrastructure. Business continuity teams focus on keeping the organization running. Each plays an important role, but responsibility for recovery can remain fragmented. --- ResOps brings these functions together around shared priorities, recovery goals, and evidence. The result is a more practical way to approach resilience: know what matters most, understand what it takes to recover it, test whether recovery works, and act on the gaps you find. --- ## What Is ResOps? --- [ResOps](https://www.commvault.com/explore/resilience-operations) is the operational discipline that brings security, infrastructure, IT operations, [business continuity](https://www.commvault.com/explore/business-continuity-disaster-recovery-bcdr), and business owners together around critical services, resilient design, and continuous validation. Put simply, ResOps helps teams prepare for disruption, recover critical services within business-defined impact tolerances, and demonstrate in an evidence-based way that recovery works. --- Four characteristics define ResOps. It is: --- 1. **Cross-functional by design.** ResOps connects distributed responsibilities through a shared operating model, named ownership, and executive governance. 2. **Centered on critical services.** It prioritizes the services the organization must restore to deliver core value, serve customers, and generate revenue; as well as helping meet urgent legal, regulatory, safety, and mission obligations. 3. **Continuously validated.** Resilience is a posture that teams must exercise and improve – not a state established by an annual test. 4. **Measured through evidence.** ResOps produces a resilience posture score (RPS): a per-service, evidence-backed score that measures how recoverable a single critical service is based on validation results, dependency health, and clean-recovery confidence. --- ## What Isn’t ResOps? --- #### It’s not a product category. --- No platform can create ResOps on its own. Data protection, cyber recovery, automation, observability, and testing technologies can support the discipline, but ResOps is organizational. It depends on governance, shared accountability, business priorities, operational practices, and a common standard of evidence. --- #### It’s not a replacement for backup and recovery or disaster recovery. --- ResOps does not replace strong backup and disaster recovery capabilities: it depends on them. Backup establishes whether recoverable copies exist. Disaster recovery provides the procedures and technical capabilities to help restore systems and infrastructure. --- But then ResOps asks a broader question: Can the critical service return completely, cleanly, and within tolerance, including its identities, applications, data, infrastructure, cloud services, third parties, people, and decision paths? --- #### It’s not another name for business continuity or incident response. --- Business continuity defines how the business operates through disruption. Incident response detects, contains, and manages the event. ResOps connects those disciplines to the recovery outcome. It creates an operating rhythm for teams to agree on what matters, validate recovery under realistic conditions, measure results, and address the gaps that testing reveals. --- #### It’s not a compliance exercise or one-time project. --- A mature ResOps program can help generate evidence for boards, regulators, insurers, customers, and auditors. But documentation is a byproduct, not the objective. The objective is demonstrated recoverability. --- And because systems, dependencies, threats, and business priorities keep changing, ResOps is never “finished.” It operates continuously, much like financial planning or security operations. --- ## What Changes With ResOps? --- ResOps shifts the focus from whether individual systems and processes are working to whether the critical service as a whole can recover. That changes the questions leaders can ask. --- A successful backup is important. So is having a recovery plan. But neither one tells you whether a critical service can actually be restored when you need it. ResOps looks at the bigger picture: --- - Did we recover from a verified clean recovery point? - How long did it take? - Did we recover within the limits the business set? - And what still needs attention? --- That’s why ResOps matters. It gives organizations a way to move beyond assumptions of resilience to programmatic, reliable demonstrations of their ability to recover. And they do it with continuous production of evidence and traceability. So when disruption happens, the question isn’t whether every team did its part or who failed at which task. It’s whether the business can restore the critical services its customers depend on. --- ## Learn More --- Commvault has published [ResOps: An Executive Guide](https://www.readiverse.com/gc/resilience-operations-book) to give CISOs, CIOs, IT, security, resilience, and risk leaders a practical framework for implementing ResOps in their organizations. --- Leaders will learn how to identify the services that matter most, validate recovery readiness with real evidence, and continuously test resilience. As a result, organizations can establish a single operating model that unites security, infrastructure, IT operations, and business leaders around evidence-based recoverability. --- [Get the guide here](https://www.readiverse.com/gc/resilience-operations-book). --- ## FAQs --- **Q: Is ResOps simply a new name for disaster recovery?** --- **A:** No. Disaster recovery is an essential part of ResOps, but ResOps looks at the entire critical service – including technical, third-party, human, and decision dependencies – and whether it can recover within a business-defined impact tolerance. --- **Q: Does ResOps require buying a new platform?** --- **A:** No. Technology can support mapping, testing, recovery, and evidence collection, but ResOps starts with ownership, governance, business priorities, and operating practices. --- **Q: Who owns ResOps?** --- **A:** ResOps needs a named leader with cross-functional authority and executive sponsorship. Individual service owners remain accountable for their services, while security, IT, business continuity, and business teams contribute to the shared recovery outcome. --- **Q: How is ResOps success measured?** --- **A:** Success comes from current evidence that critical services can recover cleanly within their defined impact tolerances – not simply from completing a plan or running a successful backup job. --- A resilience posture score (RPS) is also a useful measurement tool. As a per-service, evidence-backed score, RPS helps demonstrate how recoverable a single critical service is based on validation results, dependency health, and clean-recovery confidence. --- **Q: How do organizations get started with ResOps?** --- **A:** Start by identifying the critical services the business depends on, who owns them, what they depend on, and how quickly they need to recover. From there, teams can validate recovery, identify gaps, and prioritize the work needed to strengthen resilience. --- *[Michael Thelander](https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaeljthelander/) is Senior Director of Product Marketing at Commvault.*