From Assumptions to Evidence: How Customized Peer Benchmarking Accelerated a Global Resilience Program

The Challenge

A large, globally operating organization recognized that while its resilience program was well established, leadership lacked a clear, objective context on how the program compared to peers, and whether current funding, staffing, and governance were sufficient to meet rising operational, regulatory, and third-party risk demands.

Executives were asking increasingly sophisticated questions:

• Are we investing at the right level compared to organizations like us?

• How mature is our program relative to peers with similar global footprints?

• Where should we prioritize improvement to stay ahead of emerging expectations?

  
  

What was missing wasn’t commitment; it was peer-based evidence to guide strategic decisions.

The organization sought a credible, third-party assessment that could benchmark its resilience program against comparable organizations while translating results into insights executives could act on.

The Solution: A Customized, Peer-Based Resilience Benchmarking Assessment

Resilience360 Advisory conducted a tailored Resilience Program Benchmarking Assessment, designed to compare the organization’s program against carefully selected peer groups based on:

• Industry sector

• Global footprint

• Employee population

This approach ensured the analysis reflected organizations facing similar operational complexity, regulatory exposure, and scale, not generic industry averages.

The assessment leveraged:

• 15+ years of global resilience benchmarking experience

• Proprietary resilience maturity scoring methodology

• A 20+ page executive-ready report with peer-based data visualizations

The organization completed our confidential Resilience Management Study questionnaire, which assessed governance, program structure, resourcing, execution, and integration across:

• Business Continuity

• Crisis Management

• IT Disaster Recovery

• Emergency Management

The result was both a quantitative maturity score and a qualitative comparison against peers, providing clarity that executives had not previously had.

Key Findings: Strong Performance with Targeted Opportunities

The benchmarking results confirmed that the organization was performing above both industry and peer-group averages, earning a program maturity score of 146, compared to:

• Industry average: 112

• Peer group average: 132

This placed the organization firmly in the “Evolving” maturity tier, where resilience processes are quantitatively managed and continuously improved.

The assessment validated several strengths:

• A comprehensive, enterprise-wide resilience framework

• Strong integration across continuity, crisis, IT recovery, and emergency management

• Demonstrated leadership commitment and program discipline

At the same time, the peer-based data surfaced specific, actionable opportunities to advance maturity further, including:

• Formalizing executive governance through a resilience steering committee

• Increasing structured third-party exercise coordination

• Expanding the frequency of independent external audits

• Investing in greater technology enablement and analytics

• Modestly increasing dedicated resilience headcount and budget to align with peer trends

Importantly, these insights were grounded in peer reality, not opinion, allowing leadership to see where incremental investment would yield the greatest return.

The Result: Executive Alignment and Approved Investment

Armed with objective, peer-based benchmarking data, the organization was able to:

• Confidently engage executives with evidence, not assumptions

• Validate where the program was strong, and where it needed reinforcement

• Prioritize actions through a clear, phased roadmap

As a direct outcome of the assessment:

• Executives approved additional dedicated headcount

• A formal roadmap was developed to advance governance, analytics, and third-party coordination

• The resilience program gained greater visibility and credibility at the leadership level

The client described the assessment as a turning point, not because it exposed failure, but because it provided clarity, confidence, and a defensible path forward.

Why Peer-Based Benchmarking Matters

Resilience programs don’t stall because leaders don’t care. They stall when decisions are made without context.

Customized peer benchmarking replaces assumptions with insight, and enables resilience leaders to speak the language executives understand: evidence, comparability, and strategic value.

For this organization, the assessment didn’t just measure maturity; it accelerated it.

View a confidential version of this customized report. Contact a Resilience360 Advisory representative to explore a confidential assessment.