Living with COVID-19 – Continued Impact on Your Business

August 5, 2021

It has been over 17 months since COVID-19 shutdown impacted your business and personal life.  Although we are on the road to recovery, as the variants continue to emerge, it is not a straight path to “business as usual.” In addition, other business threats from cybercrime, severe weather, climate change, and political instabilities continue to grow.  Thus, organizational resilience remains a strategic priority to be prepared for unforeseen impacts to your business.

Building a path to organizational resilience starts with having solid business continuity management (BCM).  This provides the basis for your business to prepare for and respond to disruptive events.  Most organizations have BCM; however, it is critical to update regularly and perform (at minimum) annual exercises to make sure the plan works.  The next step is to obtain operational resilience, expanding BCM programs to focus on the impact and tolerance levels of service delivery disruption on clients.  The final step in achieving organizational resilience is where the organization resists, absorbs, recovers, and adapts to business disruption in an ever-changing and increasingly complex environment to deliver its objectives and rebound and prosper.

Why should your business achieve organizational resilience?

• Continued remote workforce – although many businesses are returning to the office in some form, due to the continued spread of COVID-19, employees wanting to maintain more of a work/life balance or employers decreasing their office footprint, remote working will continue through 2021 and beyond. Remote working is contributing to the evolving threats related to cloud computing, data privacy, and cybercrime. Operational resilience with solid governance, a robust business continuity management program, IT resilience, and cybersecurity program management for digital innovations will be vital to supporting the delivery and achieving your business’s goals and objectives in an uncertain world.
• Increase in cybersecurity attacks – operational resilience plans should encompass the growing security and safety risks. Bad actors have increasingly expanded their tactics to target ransomware attacks on operational systems.  When it comes to critical infrastructure, the United States National Security Agency (NSA) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) are sufficiently alarmed in the U.S. and warn “Over recent months, cyber actors have demonstrated their continued willingness to conduct malicious cyber activity against critical infrastructure (CI) by exploiting internet-accessible operational technology (OT) assets.”

Organizational resilience is vital to:

• Stability by resisting, absorbing, and rebounding from disruption
• Supply chain scrutiny and resilience
• Workforce and resource planning
• Reassurance to customers and stakeholders

If your business needs help in developing or updating your BCM or moving up to achieve
organizational resilience, Dewpoint is here to help.  Our team of cybersecurity, infrastructure, and application experts can prepare your business for the next crisis.