Wednesday, 25 January 2012
Unplanned IT and telecom outages is leading threat to business
A survey by the Business Continuity Institute (BCI) has found that the leading threat to business is unplanned IT and telecom outages.
Lyndon Bird FBCI, Technical Development Director at the BCI
The survey, Horizon Scan 2012, asked 458 organisations across 49 countries to rate their levels of concern against 28 identified threats to their business, based on their own risk assessment.
The top five threats evaluated through risk assessment, based on those registering ‘extremely concerned’ and ‘concerned’, are:
- Unplanned IT and telecom outages—74%
- Data breach (i.e. loss or theft of confidential information)—68%
- Cyber attack (e.g. malware, denial of service)—65%
- Adverse weather (e.g. windstorm/tornado, flooding, snow, drought)—59%
- Interruption to utility supply (i.e. water, gas, electricity, waste disposal)—56%
Results were similar across the globe with two main exceptions.
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Indian respondents cited transport network disruption, social unrest and fire taking as the top three threats, while in Japan, respondents put the threat of an earthquake and tsunami as their number one threat. An environmental incident and interruption to utility suppliers were in second and third positions respectively.
There was significant agreement in most industry sectors analysed that the threats that pose most concern were data breaches, cyber attack and unplanned outages. However, respondents in manufacturing listed supply chain disruption as their primary concern, followed by unplanned IT/telecom outage and a product safety incident.
The survey also asked about expectations on investment levels in mitigating these threats. The results show that for 10% of respondents, investment levels will fall, while for 50%, levels will be the same. Only 25% reported an expected increase in levels of investment.
Lyndon Bird FBCI, Technical Development Director at the BCI, said: “The prominence of cyber attacks and data breaches in this survey reflects the need to take a more comprehensive approach to dealing with the problem, one which is strategic in nature and not purely technical. Executives need to ask why people are trying to disrupt their business or steal confidential information. Also, private and public sector organisations need to work collectively and adopt more of an ‘open sharing’ approach, so that common cyber threats can be identified more quickly.”
He added: “Looking beyond the top list of threats, we can see that business continuity thinking is being more widely applied than in the past. We would rarely have seen threats such as ‘business ethics incident’, ‘new laws or regulations’, ‘the availability of credit’ or ‘exchange rate volatility’ registering too many responses. This confirms the growing recognition among management teams that business continuity management is a very effective all risks approach to business resilience”.
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