Breaking Down Silos: The Key to Building True Operational Resilience

In today’s volatile environment, resilience is no longer optional. Cyberattacks, supply chain failures, natural disasters, and geopolitical tensions all have the power to bring an organization to its knees in a matter of hours. Yet, despite this awareness, too many organizations still approach resilience in a fragmented way.

IT architecture teams design robust infrastructures. Compliance departments ensure regulatory requirements are met. Cybersecurity functions defend against digital threats. Each team operates with competence and often with passion — but all too often they do so in isolation.

This siloed approach creates an illusion of resilience. It may look reassuring on paper, with well-written continuity plans, security policies, and regulatory checklists. But when a real disruption strikes, these silos quickly collapse. What seemed like preparedness turns into confusion, duplication, and, at worst, paralysis.

True resilience cannot be built within walls. It requires collaboration between IT architecture, compliance, and cybersecurity, anchored by the strategic involvement of the board.

IT Architecture, Compliance, and Cybersecurity: Three Pillars of Resilience

To understand why collaboration is so critical, we need to first appreciate what each function brings to the table.

IT architecture is the backbone of resilience. It is responsible for designing and maintaining systems that are scalable, reliable, and adaptable. When disruptions occur — whether due to a cyber incident, a natural disaster, or a sudden spike in demand — resilient IT architecture ensures that critical systems remain available.

Compliance provides the guardrails of trust. It ensures the organization respects the legal and regulatory frameworks in which it operates. A compliance team monitors changes in laws, prepares the evidence for audits, and embeds governance into business processes. While sometimes dismissed as bureaucratic, compliance is in fact central to building stakeholder confidence. Without it, even the most robust technical systems can leave the organization exposed to fines, sanctions, or reputational damage.

Cybersecurity, finally, is the shield against malicious actors. It protects systems, networks, and data from external and internal threats. It provides capabilities for threat detection, incident response, and vulnerability management. No matter how well-designed IT systems are, or how thorough compliance documentation may be, without effective cybersecurity they can be compromised in minutes.

Individually, these three functions are indispensable. Together, they form the foundation of operational resilience.

Why Silos Fail in Practice

When IT architecture, compliance, and cybersecurity operate in silos, the weaknesses show quickly.

Consider a ransomware attack on a critical third-party vendor. The cybersecurity team may detect the intrusion and raise the alarm. But without close collaboration, IT architecture may not know which systems need immediate failover, or how the compromise affects dependencies. Meanwhile, compliance may be left scrambling to figure out what reporting obligations are triggered, and whether regulators need to be notified within 24 hours. Each team acts — but not in concert. The result is delay, confusion, and unnecessary damage.

Silos create hidden costs in normal operations as well. Risk assessments are often duplicated, with each team running its own exercises rather than pooling insights. Priorities clash: IT tends to focus on system availability, cybersecurity on data confidentiality, and compliance on audit readiness. Without integration, these different perspectives can become sources of conflict rather than complementary strengths.

Boards also suffer from siloed reporting. Instead of receiving a clear, consolidated view of the organization’s resilience posture, directors are presented with fragmented information. Each department provides its own metrics, making it difficult to see the bigger picture or to understand systemic vulnerabilities.

History provides painful examples of the cost of silos. The NotPetya cyberattack in 2017 crippled global shipping giant Maersk, costing an estimated $300 million. Analysts noted that siloed functions slowed the company’s response and recovery. If IT architecture, compliance, and cybersecurity had been integrated — and guided by a board-level resilience strategy — the outcome could have been less catastrophic.

The Power of Convergence

Breaking down silos does more than eliminate inefficiencies. It creates a fundamentally stronger posture against disruption.

When IT architecture, compliance, and cybersecurity speak the same language of risk, the organization moves from fragmented concerns to shared priorities. Instead of IT focusing only on downtime, cybersecurity on breaches, and compliance on fines, they align on common impacts: customer harm, financial loss, and reputational damage. This shared framework enables better decisions.

A converged approach also provides an end-to-end view of critical services. For example, if online banking is identified as a critical business service, IT ensures system availability, cybersecurity protects against intrusion, and compliance guarantees that customer and regulatory expectations are met. By looking at the service holistically, rather than through isolated lenses, the organization can prioritize resources more effectively.

Perhaps most importantly, convergence accelerates response. In an integrated model, a cybersecurity detection automatically triggers IT recovery measures and compliance reporting. Rather than passing the baton between teams, the organization acts as a single, coordinated unit.

From Silos to Integration: How to Get There

The first step toward integration must come from the top. Boards cannot delegate resilience entirely to IT, compliance, or cybersecurity. They are accountable, especially under regulations like DORA and NIS2, and they must act as catalysts for collaboration. This means requiring joint reporting, aligning incentives, and sponsoring cross-functional committees dedicated to resilience.

From there, organizations should start by defining critical business services together. Too often, risk registers are developed in isolation, leading to misaligned priorities. Instead, IT, cybersecurity, and compliance leaders should jointly identify the most essential services, agree on acceptable levels of disruption, and assign shared responsibility for protecting them.

Risk assessments also need to evolve. Rather than running three separate exercises, organizations should conduct integrated assessments that consider technical, security, and regulatory dimensions simultaneously. Scenario testing — for example, simulating a ransomware attack on a supplier — should involve all three departments working side by side.

Exercises should be frequent, realistic, and cross-functional. When a disruption is simulated, IT should practice failover, cybersecurity should rehearse incident response, and compliance should practice regulatory notifications. These joint drills build muscle memory and strengthen collaboration under pressure.

Finally, reporting must be unified. Instead of fragmented dashboards, boards should receive a consolidated view of resilience. Advances in AI and analytics make it possible to merge inputs from IT, cybersecurity, and compliance into a single source of truth. This enables directors to see where gaps exist, how risks intersect, and what trade-offs need to be made.

Why the Board Must Lead

Ultimately, integration cannot succeed without board sponsorship. Boards are accountable for resilience in the eyes of regulators and investors. They also set the tone for collaboration.

When boards insist on joint reporting and shared accountability, they force silos to come down. When they link executive incentives to resilience outcomes, they ensure collaboration is rewarded rather than seen as optional. And when they demand a service-centric approach — one that focuses on customer outcomes rather than departmental metrics — they create the conditions for sustainable resilience.

Without board involvement, efforts to integrate IT, compliance, and cybersecurity often stall at middle-management level. With it, integration becomes a strategic imperative, embedded in governance and culture.

Practical Recommendations for Leaders

For organizations that want to move toward integrated resilience, a few guiding principles stand out. Create a resilience council, ideally chaired by a board member, where IT, compliance, and cybersecurity leaders meet regularly to align on strategy and execution. Shift from siloed risk registers to service-based resilience maps that identify the most critical business services and their tolerances. Invest in shared tools — dashboards, AI assistants, centralized repositories — that give everyone access to the same data. And above all, run regular joint exercises that test collaboration under pressure.

Conclusion: Resilience Is a Collective Responsibility

Resilience is not about avoiding disruption. It is about ensuring the organization can continue to operate, adapt, and even thrive when disruption inevitably comes. That cannot be achieved by IT architecture, compliance, or cybersecurity alone.

Breaking down silos between these three functions — and ensuring the board drives integration from the top — is the only way to achieve true resilience. Organizations that succeed will not only survive crises but will emerge stronger, more trusted, and better positioned for long-term success.

Because in the end, resilience is not the job of a department. It is the responsibility of the entire organization.