Author: Owen Miles, VP Solutions Engineering EMEA for Restrata
Blog Series: ‘Miles to Go’ – Exploring the foundations of resilience & continuity
#3 – The Resilience Budget: Funding What Matters
Resilience is often framed as a cost – a necessary line item to satisfy compliance, reduce risk, or reassure stakeholders. But the truth is, resilience isn’t a cost center. It’s a capability. And how you fund it says a lot about how seriously you take it.
I’ve worked with organizations that spend millions on cybersecurity but overlook crisis communication. Others invest heavily in physical infrastructure but neglect continuity planning. The result? Imbalance. Gaps. And a resilience posture that’s strong in some areas – but fragile in others.
The most resilient organizations I’ve worked with treat resilience as a strategic investment. They don’t ask, “How much can we save?” They ask, “How much can we protect?”
1. Budgeting for Capability, Not Just Compliance
Resilience touches everything – operations, technology, people, reputation. That makes budgeting complex. It’s not just about buying tools or hiring consultants. It’s about enabling capability across the business.
That means funding training, testing, integration, and cultural change. These aren’t always visible on a balance sheet – but they’re essential. Because resilience isn’t built by tools alone. It’s built by people who know how to use them.
2. The Cost of Underinvestment
When disruption hits, the cost of underinvestment becomes painfully clear. Downtime. Confusion. Reputation damage. Burnout. Legal exposure. These aren’t theoretical risks – they’re real costs. And they often exceed the price of prevention many times over.
I’ve seen organizations hesitate to fund resilience initiatives because the ROI isn’t immediate. But when the moment comes, the value becomes undeniable.
3. Making the Case for Investment
To secure budget, you need to speak the language of leadership. That means framing resilience in terms of:
- Risk reduction: What’s the financial impact of a disruption – and how does this investment mitigate it?
- Operational continuity: How does this funding protect revenue, service delivery, and customer trust?
- Strategic enablement: How does resilience support growth, agility, and innovation?
It also means quantifying the intangible. What’s the cost of hesitation? What’s the value of confidence? What’s the impact of trust?
4. Embedding Resilience into Financial Planning
The most mature organizations embed resilience into their annual planning cycles. It’s not a one-off project – it’s a recurring line item. They treat it like insurance, infrastructure, and innovation – because it’s all three.
They also decentralize investment. Instead of one department owning resilience, they empower teams across the business to fund and build their own capabilities. That creates ownership, momentum, and scale.
Because resilience isn’t a cost – it’s a capability. And funding it properly is the first step toward making it real.
Call to Action: Review your current resilience spend. Is it reactive or strategic? Identify one area where increased investment could reduce risk, improve response, or enable growth – and make the case for funding it.
Next Week: We’ll explore how to measure resilience in ways that matter – beyond audits and checklists, and into the metrics that actually reflect readiness.