GRC and BCM: Why 92% of Organizations Feel Ready for Disruption, But Only 4 in 10 Actually Are

There’s a number that should unsettle anyone responsible for organizational resilience. 92% of senior leaders across audit, risk, compliance, BCM, IT resilience, and cybersecurity say they’re confident in their ability to meet recovery objectives. Yet when disruption actually hits. Fewer than four in ten of those same organizations meet the recovery targets they were confident about. That gap, between how prepared organizations feel and how prepared they actually are, is the single most important story in business continuity management right now. And it’s a story that Governance, Risk, and Compliance functions are uniquely positioned to fix. If they stop treating BCM as a separate discipline and start treating it as the operational proof point of everything GRC claims to do.

This isn’t a theoretical problem. It’s measurable, it’s widespread, and the data behind it tells a clearer story than most boardroom conversations about “resilience” ever do.

The Confidence Gap Is Bigger Than Most Leaders Realize

A recent survey of 506 senior leaders found something worth sitting with. Resilience programs consistently break down in the same three places. Dependency mapping, third-party risk, and AI governance, regardless of industry or company size. Leaders across North America, the UK, Germany, and the UAE reported feeling prepared. Yet the actual test of readiness, whether recovery targets were met when disruption struck, told a very different story.

This isn’t a story about lazy risk management. Most organizations genuinely have the artifacts of a mature program: documented plans, governance frameworks, defined recovery objectives, executive sponsorship. The problem is that these documents describe intention, not tested capability. A plan that has never been stress-tested against a real dependency failure is, functionally, a hypothesis. And a striking number of organizations are operating entire continuity strategies on hypotheses that have never been checked.

The Global Preparedness Picture Is Worse Than Most Assume

Zoom out from that confidence gap, and the broader numbers get harder to look away from. Only 49% of businesses globally have a formal continuity plan in place. This means roughly half of the world’s companies would be improvising their way through a serious operational disruption rather than executing a tested response.

The disconnect between belief and reality shows up again in a separate U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation survey: 94% of businesses believe their companies would recover from a disaster, yet only 26% actually have a disaster plan in place. That’s not a small discrepancy. That’s a 68-point gap between confidence and documented preparedness, in the same population of businesses.

And preparedness scales sharply with company size, which should concern GRC & BCM leaders at growing mid-market organizations in particular. Only 30% of small firms have a business continuity strategy, compared to 54% of mid-sized companies and 73% of large corporations. The organizations least prepared are often the ones with the least capacity to absorb a prolonged disruption in the first place.

Where Resilience Programs Actually Break

If confidence isn’t the problem, and documentation isn’t the problem, what is? The data points to a few very specific, very fixable failure points.

Third-party and supply chain dependency is the weakest link almost everywhere. In a 2026 industry survey, only 3% of respondents rated their supply chains as “very resilient.” That’s not a rounding error, it’s a near-universal blind spot. Regulators have started responding accordingly. Frameworks like the FCA’s PS21/3 and Australia’s CPS 230 now hold firms directly accountable for services delivered through third parties, closing the door on the old assumption that a vendor’s failure is the vendor’s problem.

Most organizations still don’t have a plan at all when they need one most. Perhaps the most sobering statistic in this space. 57% of organizations that actually experience a business disruption do not have a continuity plan in place at the time it happens. Preparedness, in other words, isn’t just uneven, it’s frequently absent at exactly the moment it matters.

Outages are becoming a baseline operating condition, not an exception. Unexpected network outages now affect 91% of businesses at least once per quarter. And 84% of surveyed companies reported an increase in network outages over just the past two years. Disruption isn’t a rare event anymore. It’s a recurring operating condition that continuity planning has to be built for as a certainty, not a contingency.

Why This Is a GRC Problem, Not Just a BCM Problem

Here’s where the story usually gets told incorrectly. Business continuity is often positioned as its own function, adjacent to but separate from broader governance, risk, and compliance work. That separation is exactly what allows the confidence gap to persist.

BCM protects more than uptime. It protects operational continuity, revenue flow, stakeholder trust, and the quality of decisions leaders make when facts are incomplete and time is short. Every one of those outcomes is also a core GRC & BCM concern. A continuity plan that’s never been integrated with the organization’s risk register, its third-party risk assessments, and its compliance obligations is a plan built in isolation, tested against nothing, and accountable to no one until the moment it fails publicly.

When BCM sits inside a genuinely integrated GRC framework, three things change for the better. Dependency mapping stops being a BCM-only exercise. It becomes something risk and vendor management teams contribute to continuously, not once a year during a tabletop exercise. Third-party risk, the single weakest point in most programs, gets tracked with the same rigor as any other compliance obligation, rather than living in a separate vendor spreadsheet nobody else sees. And recovery testing gets treated as an audit-grade activity, with evidence, tracked remediation, and executive visibility, rather than a checkbox exercise performed to satisfy a policy requirement.

The Market Is Already Moving In This Direction

The scale of investment flowing into this space reflects how seriously the market is starting to treat this problem. The global business continuity management market grew from $1.28 billion in 2025 toward $1.45 billion in 2026, a 13.3% compound annual growth rate, driven directly by rising regulatory compliance requirements, increasing operational disruptions, and expanding corporate risk management practices. That growth is expected to continue at a similar pace through the rest of the decade.

Much of that growth is being driven by the same shift GRC has already been undergoing. A move away from static, document-heavy planning toward continuous, integrated, technology-enabled resilience. Real-time risk assessment, AI-assisted planning, and cloud-based continuity infrastructure are increasingly framed not as nice-to-have upgrades. But as the baseline expectation for any organization that wants its continuity program to survive contact with a real disruption.

Closing the Gap: What Actually Works

For organizations that want to close their own version of that 92%-versus-40% gap, a few shifts consistently separate programs that hold up from ones that don’t.

Treat every continuity plan as untested until it’s actually been tested. Documentation is not evidence of capability. Regular, realistic testing, ideally against the specific dependency and third-party failure modes most likely to occur, is the only way to know whether a recovery objective is real or aspirational.

Make third-party risk a first-class citizen of the continuity program, not an afterthought. Given how consistently vendor and supply chain dependency shows up as the weakest link. This deserves dedicated ownership, regular reassessment, and integration directly into the organization’s broader GRC risk register, not a separate, rarely-reviewed vendor file.

Fold BCM into the same governance rhythm as every other compliance obligation. When continuity planning reports through the same structure as regulatory compliance and enterprise risk, it gets the same executive attention, the same audit rigor, and the same accountability, instead of being treated as a specialized function that only surfaces during an annual review.

Plan for disruption as a certainty, not a possibility. With the large majority of businesses already experiencing outages on a quarterly basis, the operating assumption should shift from “if disruption occurs” to “when the next one occurs, and how fast can we prove we’re actually ready.”

The Real Measure of Resilience

Confidence has never been a reliable indicator of readiness, and the data makes that painfully clear. The organizations that will handle the next disruption well aren’t the ones that feel most prepared in a survey. They’re the ones that have closed the distance between what their plans say and what their plans have actually been proven, under real pressure, to do.

That’s not a BCM problem to solve in isolation. It’s a GRC and BCM problem. And treating it as anything less than that is precisely how so many well-documented, well-intentioned continuity programs end up in the 60% that don’t hold when it matters most.

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