Resilience Planning is Critical
The incident also serves as a wake-up call that as digital and physical worlds converge, resilience planning in digital infrastructure is not optional but essential. Enterprises are now having to rethink their risk management strategies, and regulators are likely contemplating even higher standards of transparency, uptime guarantees, and tighter oversight of providers of such critical technological services.
It further highlights the broader ramifications for how we view, design, and manage the risks associated with global digital infrastructure. This disruption forces stakeholders to reconsider not only technical redundancies, but also strategic shifts towards evaluating more distributed, cloud-agnostic architectures, including better failover systems, for critical business processes.
For customers sharing and relying upon these digital behemoths of invisible aggregated risk, an outage isn’t just a mild inconvenience; it can lead to business interruption, revenue loss, reputation damage and cascading operational nightmares with very little direct visibility as to their cause.
Organizations need to ensure that executives understand how their crisis management frameworks perform under such conditions, especially when disruptions are outside of their direct operational control. Detailed reviews and executive responses are crucial to navigating these disruptions successfully.
A delicate balance needs to be struck between leveraging cloud efficiencies, innovation, and managing the inherent risks associated with reliance on centralized external platforms for critical operations. The evolving landscape calls for careful design and reconsideration of resilience and recovery strategies that span both technology and leadership decision-making processes.
Insurance Must Evolve with Threat Landscape
At the same time, the evolving and uncertain risk landscape has made cyber insurance a critical part of an organization’s risk management strategy for technology born risk. Historically, cyber insurance was viewed as a safeguard against data breaches or attacks on a company’s own digital systems. However, as incidents continue to occur within common digital infrastructure, which companies are increasingly reliant upon, insurance policies need to adapt.
Businesses now must navigate products that not only cover breaches but also protect against business interruption, financial losses and reputation damage because of failures in, and at, third-party service providers over which they have far less risk management control and oversight. With rising claims and a shift in underwriting models, insurers are rethinking risk schema in the hope of encouraging insureds to harden their digital resilience even before a claim is filed.
