Overview
ISO/IEC 9837:2026 - Systems and Software Engineering: Systems Resilience Concepts provides a unified set of concepts supporting the understanding and improvement of systems resilience. This standard addresses the ability of human-created systems-whether physical, conceptual, or hybrid-to maintain required capabilities when encountering adversity. Designed for systems as defined in ISO/IEC/IEEE 15288, including products and services, ISO/IEC 9837:2026 underpins efforts in systems engineering, architecture, and lifecycle processes to ensure robust, adaptable, and recoverable system performance.
Systems resilience is an essential quality characteristic for contemporary engineering, supporting organizations worldwide as they look to prevent, withstand, and recover from disruptions. This standard lays the foundation for resilience frameworks and techniques, enhancing stakeholders’ ability to respond to a diverse array of challenges in both digital and physical systems.
Key Topics
ISO/IEC 9837:2026 introduces and defines critical systems resilience concepts, focusing on the following areas:
- Resilience Fundamentals: Core definitions such as resilience (the ability to provide required capability under adversity), capability, adversity, stress, error recovery, and fault.
- Fundamental Objectives: Three principal goals for resilience-avoiding adversity, withstanding adversity, and recovering from adversity.
- Means Objectives: Intermediate objectives contributing to resilience, including agility, anticipation, integrity, damage control, robustness, prevention, and more.
- Resilience Techniques: Practical methods to achieve resilience, like adaptive response, anomaly detection, boundary enforcement, defense-in-depth, redundancy, modularity, self-modelling, and virtualization.
- Relationship to Other System Qualities: How resilience connects to availability, dependability, recoverability, security, maintainability, flexibility, and safety.
- Resilience Framework: A structured approach comprising fundamental objectives, means objectives, and corresponding techniques.
- Systems Engineering Integration: Application of resilience concepts throughout the systems engineering lifecycle, emphasizing early incorporation during requirements, architecture, design, and operations.
Applications
ISO/IEC 9837:2026 is valuable across multiple domains where systems resilience is key to sustained operation and service delivery:
- Systems Engineering and Architecture: Embedding resilience into requirements, architectural design, and product lifecycle management.
- Product and Service Development: Ensuring digital services, embedded systems, and critical infrastructure can maintain essential functions under stress or attack.
- Information Technology and Software Engineering: Supporting robust, fault-tolerant software systems and IT services.
- Operational Risk Management: Informing strategies for incident response, disaster recovery, and business continuity.
- Safety- and Security-Critical Systems: Guiding practices in sectors such as transportation, energy, healthcare, and telecommunications.
- Organizational Resilience Planning: Establishing enterprise-wide standards and guidelines for handling adverse conditions affecting mission-critical systems.
Adopting ISO/IEC 9837:2026 empowers organizations to proactively manage and mitigate risks posed by both expected and unforeseen adverse events, leading to systems that can adapt, recover, and continue functioning under duress.
Related Standards
For a comprehensive approach to systems resilience, ISO/IEC 9837:2026 references and aligns with several key standards, including:
- ISO/IEC/IEEE 15288: Systems and software engineering - System life cycle processes.
- ISO/IEC 25010: Systems and software quality models, focusing on attributes such as reliability, security, and maintainability.
- ISO/IEC 25023: Quality measures for systems and software to assess recoverability and fault-tolerance.
- IEC 60300-1:2024: Guidance on dependability management and resilience.
- IEC 62853: Concepts of resilience in open systems dependability.
These related standards provide guidance and metrics that support the implementation and assessment of resilience within systems engineering projects.
By following ISO/IEC 9837:2026, organizations and engineering teams can systematically incorporate resilience concepts into the design and management of systems, ensuring dependable performance and robust recovery under adversity.
