ANZ Business Risk Resilience Report

The COVID-19 pandemic and its associated risks—be they staff shortages, cybersecurity or supply chain disruptions—underscored the need for organisations of all sizes and maturity to build resilience for today and tomorrow. Business leaders took heed and, as such, are now acutely focused on improving organisational resilience. Yet, many still have a fair amount of work to do to become truly resilient, despite the majority of organisations in Australia having invested heavily in risk management strategies and capabilities.

To determine why this is, we asked more than 300 Australian decision makers, via research house, Antenna, how their business has managed risk and resilience over the last 18 months, and which risks they expect to show up on their radar in the year to come.

Below are our findings, which include insights and recommendations that can help C-suite executives, risk managers and other business leaders better adapt their current risk approach and strategy to future-proof their organisation’s corporate security posture against the next big crisis or disruption.

Highlights

• Prior to the pandemic, two in three Australian businesses had a continuity plan in place. But only half had planned on a pandemic scenario.

• Since COVID-19, 80% of Austrlian organisations now recognize the importance of adding a full continuity plan to their business.
• While most businesses are confident about business preparedness, and comfortable with known risks, less than a quarter (only 19%) strongly agree that their organisation has the ability to comprehensively and continuously discover risk indicators that may impact their business.
• Encouragingly, almost all businesses have invested in their organisation’s resilience—with 25% having invested over AUD $100,000 between 2019-2021— and a large majority (72%) have increased employee responsibilities, distributing