Organizations today operate in an environment where disruption is constant. Cyberattacks, identity compromises, data loss, SaaS outages, and configuration errors can impact business operations at any time.
For years, resilience strategies focused on backup, disaster recovery, and security as separate initiatives. While these capabilities remain critical, many organizations are realizing they do not fully answer the question that matters most during an incident: Can the business keep operating right now?
This challenge is driving interest in Resilience Operations (ResOps).
More than a new term, ResOps is an operating model for enterprise resilience: one designed to help organizations maintain business continuity, accelerate recovery, and continuously validate readiness in a world where disruption is no longer the exception.
What Is ResOps?
ResOps is the next evolution of enterprise resilience. Rather than treating backup, disaster recovery, security, and recovery as isolated disciplines, ResOps brings them together into a unified operational framework focused on a single outcome: keeping the business running.
At its core, ResOps combines:
- Data protection.
- Security and threat detection.
- Identity resilience.
- Recovery and orchestration.
This shift matters because modern disruptions rarely stay isolated. A ransomware attack can impact identities, data, applications, and users simultaneously. A compromised account can create cascading effects across SaaS platforms. Even a simple misconfiguration can disrupt critical operations in minutes.
In these scenarios, resilience cannot rely on disconnected tools and siloed teams. It requires a coordinated operating model designed to protect, detect, recover, and validate continuously.
Why ResOps Is Gaining Ground
ResOps is gaining ground because business conditions have changed:
- SaaS and multi-cloud sprawl mean data lives everywhere.
- Identity has become the new security perimeter.
- AI and automation are accelerating both innovation and risk.
- Disruptions are no longer rare; they are constant.
In this environment, resilience cannot rely on static plans or one-time testing. It has to become continuous, measurable, and built into operations.
That is exactly what ResOps enables.
How ResOps Works
ResOps introduces a continuous lifecycle that connects key resilience functions:
- Understand and protect what matters.
- Detect issues early.
- Recover quickly and cleanly.
- Continuously validate readiness.
Instead of treating these as separate steps, ResOps connects them into a continuous loop of protection, detection, and recovery. The result is that organizations move from hoping they can recover to having a defined path to recovery.
Why Traditional Backup and Disaster Recovery Are No Longer Enough
Recovery has always been a critical component of resilience. Within a ResOps model, however, recovery becomes much more than a technical process. It becomes a business capability.
The stakes are significant. According to IBM's 2025 Cost of a Data Breach Report, global average cost of a data breach is US$ 4.44 million. While that figure has declined by 9% due to faster identification and containment, the overall impact on organizations remains significant.
At the same time, the frequency of incidents continues to rise. According to AvePoint’s 2026 State of AI Report, 89.5% of organizations experienced at least one generative AI-related security breach in the past 12 months, reinforcing that improving response times does not reduce the need for resilient recovery.
Traditional recovery methods often require organizations to restore data one workload at a time or recover entire environments regardless of business priority. During large-scale incidents, neither approach aligns with how organizations actually operate.
Businesses do not need everything restored immediately. They need the systems, applications, and data that are essential to operations restored first.
That is where recovery shifts from a technical process to a business decision. Adopting a ResOps-focused approach begins with a few key steps:
Align Recovery to Business Impact
In a ResOps model, speed is foundational, but speed alone is not enough. Recovery has to follow the order in which the business needs to resume operations.
This is where the concept of the minimum viable company (MVC) becomes important. MVC is the smallest set of people, systems, and data an organization needs to function during a disruption. It is not about restoring everything first but about restoring what matters most, in the right order.
Express recovery supports this approach. Instead of restoring everything, organizations can prioritize what matters most and recover critical data and workloads at scale and at high speed.
By enabling faster, prioritized recovery, express recovery capabilities help organizations restore their MVC first, bring essential operations back online sooner, and reduce downtime during major incidents.
Define the Real Goal: Operational Resilience
Ultimately, ResOps is not about technology. It is about outcomes. It reframes resilience around a single goal: keeping the business running, no matter what happens.
That means:
- Prioritizing what must survive.
- Recovering in the right order.
- Reducing downtime and uncertainty.
- Proving recoverability before an incident occurs.
ResOps shifts resilience from something you test once a year to something operated every day.
What ResOps Changes for Organizations
ResOps is still emerging, and the market definition is evolving. It is best understood as a new operating discipline rather than a product category.
But the direction is clear.
Organizations are moving beyond backup, beyond disaster recovery, and toward a model where resilience is unified, continuous, and business-driven.
Resilience is no longer about getting data back but about keeping the business running. Recovery should answer one question: Can my people work? The AvePoint Confidence Platform and the Rapid Recovery System help put ResOps into practice — defining your MVC, recovering it in the right order, and proving you can do it before an incident forces the answer.
Grace Harrison is a Product Marketing Manager at AvePoint, Inc., based in Jersey City, NJ. She works in the Product Strategy department, contributing to solutions like AvePoint Cloud Backup, AvePoint Fly, and AvePoint tyGraph. Grace plays a key role in developing marketing strategies and competitive intelligence to support AvePoint's field teams and enhance their selling tools.