The mark of a strong enterprise today is no longer scale, but how well it stands when the unexpected strikes:
- When employees, partners, and customers all need timely and consistent updates.
- When regulators require fast, accurate information.
- When teams spread across geographies must coordinate in real time to keep operations moving.
In those moments, communication is the signal of resilience. It ensures that decisions happen faster, that trust is maintained, and that continuity is preserved even under pressure.
That continuity depends on multiple layers: hardened systems, flexible supply chains, and communications infrastructure that ensures critical information flows even when other channels fail.
To put it succinctly: today, it’s your communications that set the pace for your resilience.
Why Communication Resilience Matters Now
Recent years have demonstrated just how critical strong communication systems are. Distributed workforces, customer demand for instant transparency, and increasingly complex global supply networks all raise the stakes for speed and clarity.
There is hard data to underline the urgency:
- IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2024 found that average breach costs are edging upward, costing organizations globally hundreds of millions in combined losses from remediation, downtime, regulatory penalties, and brand damage.
- The same report found that more than 75% of companies took longer than 100 days to recover from major breaches.
- The Business Continuity Institute’s 2024 report on supply chain resilience observed that the vast majority of companies experienced at least one supply chain disruption in the past year.
For executive leadership, communication continuity connects directly to topline performance. Downtime, delayed shipments, or a compromised brand can erode customer trust and revenue streams. Resilience therefore must be a strategic priority that is fully embedded, measured, and resourced, with communications infrastructure as the bedrock.
Communications Infrastructure: The Unseen Backbone
When disruption strikes, the first challenge is often not repairing a system or rerouting a truck, but ensuring that people have the right information at the right time. A ransomware breach, a regional flood, or a supplier failure all trigger a common dependency: the ability to communicate quickly and reliably with employees, partners, regulators, and customers.
Continuity plans that overlook communications channels leave organizations exposed. Fragmented updates, inconsistent messaging, or delayed alerts compound the damage, slowing recovery and eroding trust. In contrast, resilient communications infrastructure — built with redundancy, interoperability, and automated escalation — ensures that teams stay connected even under maximum stress.
Leading enterprises now recognize communications infrastructure as a core element of continuity planning, and as the connective tissue that binds strategy and response into a coherent whole.
Explore Mitel solutions that deliver this resilience: MiVoice MX-ONE and OpenScape Voice for near 5x9 reliability, and MiVoice Business for private deployment flexibility.
Research Insights
A recent study conducted by Dr. Stefan Vieweg, commissioned by Mitel & Everbridge, reveals several patterns that are both concerning and instructive:
Overconfidence in preparedness
According to this study, 45% of organizations describe themselves as “moderately prepared” for disruptions such as cyberattacks, supply chain breakdowns, or climate-driven events. But this self-assessment rarely holds up under scrutiny. In live scenarios or structured simulations, recovery plans often fail to perform as expected. Documentation is out of date, roles aren’t clearly assigned, and escalation paths stall.
The result: only a small fraction of potential loss is actually prevented. Studies show that, even among confident organizations, only about 25% of total damage, whether financial, operational, or reputational, is mitigated during a major event.
This confidence gap makes leadership less likely to invest early in critical upgrades, leaving systems exposed when timing matters most.
Invisible gaps in critical systems
Risk assessments typically emphasize what’s easy to see: external threats, known vulnerabilities, or previously identified points of failure. But the most damaging incidents often originate in overlooked areas such as untested dependencies, missing telemetry, or third-tier suppliers with no resilience planning.
Without real-time monitoring and integrated alerts, early signals fail to reach the right decision-makers. Recovery delays are often traced back to poor coordination and unclear communication flows.
These invisible gaps become choke points under pressure. According to the study, 67% of companies needed weeks or months to recover from their last major incident—delays often caused not by lack of awareness, but by poor internal coordination.
High performers treat resilience as part of the organizational backbone
In top-performing organizations, resilience includes robust communication strategies. Boards review not only risk dashboards but also crisis communication readiness. These firms limit revenue losses and respond faster because their teams know how, when, and through which channels to communicate.
- Over 50% of these organizations have an active, continuous risk management program in place.
- They limit revenue losses to just 7%, compared to 145% for the least resilient firms—a 20x advantage.
- 46% use early warning systems, enabling faster, more coordinated responses.
These organizations regularly run simulations across departments and suppliers, refining response protocols and improving cross-functional readiness.
Importantly, resilience is framed not just as damage control but as a marker of operational discipline and brand trust. This makes it easier to secure executive sponsorship and maintain momentum over time.
The High Performer Playbook
Research and case studies point to certain behaviors that distinguish organizations with strong resilience. Executives who aim to strengthen their organizations should consider the following:
1. Define and align around core values
Values like reliability, transparency, and adaptability guide crisis communication choices. They influence whether to disclose a breach early, how to prioritize resources during recovery, and which partners to trust with mission-critical operations.
But values only work if they’re operationalized. That means embedding them into procurement policies, supplier agreements, internal escalation protocols, and crisis communications playbooks. When these values are visible in practice, and not just in culture decks, they reduce hesitation during emergencies and align distributed teams around consistent action.
2. Establish explicit resilience goals and cultivate risk culture
While 67% of top performers surveyed recognized the evolving risk landscape, fewer than half had formal resilience goals that were being executed against.
Effective resilience requires clarity. Set concrete objectives: maximum acceptable downtime for key systems, percentage of suppliers with verified continuity plans, or recovery time thresholds after an incident.
Metrics must also include communication readiness and speed-to-message. But resilience cannot be driven by metrics unless culture follows.
High-performing organizations normalize early risk identification, treat incident reporting as value creation, and avoid punishing those who uncover problems. When employees feel safe naming issues before they escalate, the organization stays ahead of emerging risks.
3. Allocate resilient investment wisely
Investment in communication platforms, rehearsals, and escalation protocols yields outsized returns. And clearly, smart investment is not about spending more, but about aligning budget to the most material risks. A 10–25% of revenue benchmark allows for adequate investment in cyber controls, alternative sourcing, crisis planning, and critical infrastructure without bloating overhead. Firms hitting this sweet spot saw the highest return with around 30% of damage successfully averted.
Of course, successful organizations don’t just buy tools—they fund training, testing, and cross-functional coordination. They also maintain flexibility in budget allocations to adjust quickly when new threats emerge. Poor performers often overspend reactively after a crisis or underspend due to false confidence, leaving gaps that accumulate until failure becomes inevitable.
4. Deploy digitalization and automation for early warning
Digital tools are force multipliers when applied to resilience.
Automated alerts, real-time dashboards, anomaly detection engines, and IoT sensors allow organizations to detect disruptions early, before business impact spreads. Automation ensures that alerts trigger consistent action: pre-written messages go out to stakeholders, backup systems activate, or mitigation protocols begin immediately.
The best systems integrate across business units to create shared visibility. When tools are well-integrated, teams can act faster, with fewer missteps and better coordination under pressure.
Learn more: Tools like Mitel Performance Analytics, Mitel CX Insights, and Mitel Interaction Recording provide real-time visibility and proactive alerts, enabling faster, coordinated responses.
5. Develop and retain skilled crisis teams
Resilient organizations treat crisis response as a core capability, meaning that they start by building teams who understand their roles, train regularly, and operate across silos.
Crisis teams must include communications leaders alongside IT, operations, and legal. Cross-functional fluency ensures better decision-making and faster action.
Retention matters, too: high turnover in these roles increases risk, as institutional memory and procedural fluency erode. Leading organizations support their crisis teams with leadership visibility, real incentives, and post-event debriefs that lead to real improvements.
Strengthen your crisis readiness with Mitel Managed Services or connect with one of our 1,000+ certified partners to build and maintain skilled teams.
What Executives Should Do Now
These are the actionable steps for senior leadership to move resilience from intention to impact:
- Audit comprehensively. Test plans via simulations that mimic real disruptions: cyber incidents, supply interruptions, environmental disasters. Test not only technical recovery but also communication flows under simulated stress. Review where failure points emerge. Use external audits if internal blind spots seem likely.
- Prioritize interventions with highest return. Map out risks and rank them by likelihood and potential impact. Then invest in scalable communication platforms and integrated alerting. Invest first in measures that are directly linked to core operations, rather than spreading budgets across low-impact areas.
- Operationalize resilience metrics. Translate resilience into KPIs: mean time to recover systems, supplier continuity ratios, number of unpatched vulnerabilities, drills per year. Crucially, include mean time to communicate critical updates as a core KPI. Tie these metrics to leadership performance reviews and budgeting cycles.
- Partner with expert providers and platforms. The Mitel + Everbridge alliance illustrates how combining strength in communications infrastructure with real-time critical event management tools provides seamless early warning, coordinated response, and operational visibility. Customizing those tools to your risk profile accelerates effectiveness and lowers downtime costs.
Beyond Critical Event Management, consider integrating Hybrid Communications, Performance Analytics, and Managed Services to operationalize resilience across your organization.
From Resilience to Advantage
Forget any notion of resilience as a defensive posture. It is a lever for strategic strength, and communications are its strongest signal. Organizations that build durable systems, alert culture, and responsive teams gain trust, maintain revenue through disruption, and move more decisively when change comes.
The partnership between Mitel and Everbridge offers a pathway to achieving that strength, including visibility into risk, technological tools that deliver early signals, and coordinated communication systems when every minute counts.
Start now: set communication objectives, test them, measure progress, and make resilient communication the foundation of your growth strategy.
Explore Mitel’s resilient communication solutions now:
Hybrid Communications | Performance Analytics | Managed Services | Critical Event Management