BCI report: most practitioners still see business continuity as a cost, not a strategic asset

The Business Continuity Institute published its Future of Resilience Report 2026 on October 21, 2026, drawing on a global survey of resilience practitioners. The headline finding is a significant gap between how business continuity is viewed today and how those same professionals expect it to be viewed within a decade.

Currently, 59.1% of respondents describe resilience primarily as a risk mitigation function, 53.2% view it as a regulatory necessity, and 41.7% see it as a straightforward cost. Within ten years, those same respondents expect the picture to shift considerably: 59.1% anticipate resilience being recognized chiefly as a value creator and strategic enabler, while the "cost" framing is expected to fall to 12.2%. The report also found that more than half of respondents anticipate a dedicated Chief Resilience Officer, or equivalent, becoming a standard senior role within the next decade. The skills expected to define future resilience leaders are shifting too, with strategic leadership, data analytics, and AI literacy overtaking traditional technical expertise.

For CIOs and operations leaders, the practical implication is structural. Organizations that still house business continuity planning in a compliance or IT function, with limited board visibility, may find that positioning increasingly out of step with regulatory direction and peer practice. It is a reasonable time to review how continuity planning connects to executive decision-making, whether recovery objectives are formally documented and tested, and whether the function has the cross-team reach needed to cover critical third-party dependencies.