A new way of thinking about digital resilience in companies.

Ascend Partners is a consulting firm specializing in major transformations and digital resilience of companies.

We support organizations facing a simple reality : traditional risk management approaches—cybersecurity, IT continuity, compliance, risk management—work locally but fail to grasp the real interplay between them. Yet it is precisely in these invisible dependencies and points of breakdown between disciplines that systemic risk crystallizes for any organization.

Our job is to make visible what truly determines the continuity of an organization's activity : its critical dependencies, its structural vulnerabilities, and the silent fragilities that condition its ability to withstand disruptions.

The observation that forms the basis of our approach

The Astérès 2025 report offered a clear diagnosis at the macroeconomic level : extraterritorial digital dependencies pose a major systemic risk to the European economy. The cost currently stands at €265 billion.

At the organizational level, no objective measure currently exists to assess one's own dependencies, nor to manage their control.

Leaders have access to ad hoc audits, compliance frameworks, and cybersecurity indicators. They lack a tool that tells them, at any given moment, where their company truly stands on the digital resilience spectrum – nor what levers to pull to improve.

Our response : Tercio, the operationalization of the IRN

It is from this gap that the Digital Resilience Index (DRI) was born, an initiative co-founded by David Dajiz, CEO of Ascend Partners. The DRI offers the first comprehensive, systemic, and operational analysis of an organization's resilience—a common framework for measuring what, until now, has eluded any coherent assessment, and for giving leaders a shared language to discuss and act upon it.

From this work was born Tercio, our proprietary approach that combines human expertise and technology to produce a concrete and manageable reading of resilience.

Tercio is the first approach that reconciles the business value chain—the company's vital processes—with the IT value chain that supports them. This unified perspective makes it possible to assess the resilience of each value chain, identify its points of vulnerability, and transform this analysis into a true management tool.

Tercio allows you to :

- Identifying invisible critical dependencies

- Mapping areas of systemic fragility

- Simulating organizational disruption scenarios

- Prioritize the levers of intervention with real impact

What is not visible cannot be controlled.

A decision-making tool, not just another control.

Tercio is designed as a true management tool for executive committees, boards, and business units. It serves three purposes :

- Internal Management — a dashboard directly usable by management to monitor and prioritize resilience

- Sector comparison — a benchmark for positioning the company against its peers

- Decision support — a tool to prioritize investments and guide long-term strategic choices

Beyond diagnosis, Tercio also provides support for major technological transformations : deployment of reliable and secure AI, migration to sovereign cloud environments, definition of an open source policy at scale, revision of the technological supply chain or transformation of critical architectures.

The goal is not to add more control. It's to give leaders what they lack today : a clear understanding of what truly determines their organization's resilience, and the levers to act.