Introduction
How confident are you that your operations are resilient enough to tackle today’s challenges while preparing for tomorrow’s? If your answer is ‘very confident’, you’re not alone. According to SolarWinds’ 2025 IT Trends Report, over 90% of IT professionals believe their organisations are resilient in the face of today’s demands. Of those, 38% say their resilience is ‘very strong’, while 55% describe it as ‘moderate’. Encouraging figures – but are they an accurate reflection of operational strength, or simply optimism shaped by current capabilities and future-focused investments?
Dig deeper into the data, and a more nuanced story emerges. While initial confidence in overall resilience is high, that certainty wavers when respondents are asked about specific IT challenges – such as AI adoption and cybersecurity threats. Regulatory readiness may also have factored into building that confidence. Some IT teams likely feel more resilient having prepared for CPS 230 – a new standard that calls for stronger operational oversight and improved resilience, particularly within the financial services sector.
To understand real resilience, our IT Trends Report evaluated three key areas: teams, workflows, and tools. We uncovered how prepared Australian organisations really are for disruption – and gained insights into how true operational resilience can be realised.
A Tale of Teams, Workflows, and Tools
We define operational resilience as the ability to anticipate risks, respond to disruption, and adapt continuously through aligned teams, tools, workflows, and a culture of learning. In practice, that means using the right tech to surface clear insights, building skilled teams to act on them, and enabling collaboration through well-structured workflows. So how well are Australian businesses doing in that regard?
Not too well, apparently. Our findings show that despite high confidence, 45% of IT teams still spend a quarter of their week resolving critical issues and service disruptions. That’s valuable time lost to firefighting critical issues – time that could be spent driving innovation. This suggests that many may be overestimating what true resilience looks like. But what if confidence stems not from performance, but from the tools and technologies available? What if it’s measured on having the right tech, for the right problems, at the right time?
That could be the perception – it certainly explains why only 23% cited tech gaps as the top barrier to resilience. Most may feel well-equipped from a tooling perspective. But tools alone aren’t enough – they need the right people and processes behind them. Unsurprisingly, over 45% pointed to process issues, like the lack of automated, connected workflows, as their biggest challenge, while 32% cited staffing shortages and skill gaps.
Building Towards True Operational Resilience
For organisations serious about building operational resilience, the path is clear: invest strategically into three core building blocks – teams, workflows, and tools – and tackle the weakest link first.
Start with teams. Get a clear, high-level view of how team relationships function. Mapping interaction points can reveal where things flow smoothly, where handovers occur, where relationships could be stronger, and where friction builds. Ask your people: who do they typically work with? Who gets looped in when things go wrong… and why?
This mapping uncovers hidden assumptions, weak links, or unclear roles. From there, it’s all about reinforcing and building relationships – showing how tighter alignment between people leads to tighter operational resilience.
Next, assess workflows. You’ll uncover most workflow gaps and opportunities simply by talking with your team. For instance, you might learn how one person’s helpful process can hinder another’s. Some might suggest improvements, while others may be struggling due to a lack of visibility into adjacent systems – slowing down response and breaking the chain of accountability.
Like you did with your teams, map the points where workflows connect – or fail to. With the right full-stack observability in place, you can pinpoint which processes need streamlining and strengthening before you even begin layering on new tech or tools.
Finally, revisit your tools. Use the visibility gained from analysing your teams and workflows to identify which tools are delivering real value – and which aren’t. This insight will make cost-benefit analysis and impact assessments far more grounded, helping you invest in technologies that meaningfully contribute to operational resilience.
For many organisations, tool sprawl is the silent killer. As IT becomes more decentralised to boost flexibility and responsiveness, a tangled web of disconnected tools can quickly emerge – undermining efficiency and resilience. Here’s where full-stack observability is critical. Clear, unified visibility across your entire tech stack is what keeps sprawl in check and resilience high – allowing teams to resolve disruptions without being slowed down.
Through Visibility Comes Resilience
It’s time for IT leaders and their teams to ground their understanding of resilience in data, not just gut feel. Full-stack observability provides the real-time visibility needed to see how teams operate, how workflows perform, and how tools deliver (or fail to). With this clarity, organisations can make smarter, faster decisions – prioritising investments, fixing what’s broken, and reinforcing what works.
And finally, it’s important to remember that resilience isn’t a one-time achievement. It’s an ongoing capability and priority – built on transparency, driven by insight, and sustained through alignment across people, processes, and technology.
