A report published today by The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) highlights the importance of shoring up organizational resilience to respond to the opportunities and risks cloud computing brings.

The report, sponsored by Sungard Availability Services, explores the role of resilience in a world with a growing cloud presence.

Organizational resilience, as defined for this study, means that managers are no longer reactive but instead proactively anticipate and prepare for both sudden and gradual strategic shifts. How companies build resilience must be linked to an organization’s overall business strategy and requires broad mobilization of corporate capabilities across an organization and strong corporate leadership. Roughly 71 percent of respondents say their organization has clearly defined roles and responsibilities to ensure organizational resilience.

In a survey conducted in France, the United Kingdom, and United States, nearly two-thirds of executives say that more than half of their organizations’ systems are already cloud-based and 78 percent say that their use of cloud computing will increase in the next three years.

The cloud helps organizations rapidly add new IT capabilities and applications, often at a lower lifetime cost. But the cloud introduces more external players and potential breakage points. The most commonly cited risks are security breaches and leaks of confidential information (53 percent), disruptions caused by cyber attacks (52 percent) and potential failure to deliver product or services (46 percent).

“The cloud brings many benefits including collaboration and cost savings,” said Carolyn Whelan, the report’s editor. “But because of its fragmented nature the cloud also brings risks. Our survey shows that organizational resilience will grow in importance along with the cloud, to capture value from and respond to its challenges.”