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The not-so-modern phenomenon making the digitalized world shudder

Surprising no one, Allianz Group has named Business Interruption (BI) as the global business community’s most feared risk in its 2018 Risk Barometer report. It is now the sixth straight year that BI has taken this distinction.

What this means is that more than 1,900 risk management experts from top international enterprises have expressed, ad nauseum, the perils of systems outages—ones resulting not only from natural disasters but also from digitalization and the delicate interconnectedness of all business services.

Technology risk is any potential for technology failures to disrupt your business such as information security incidents or service outages.¹

Sometime at the beginning of the year, the Head of Infrastructure of a manufacturing company walks into the CIO’s office: “I just had Oracle on the phone. We have a problem”, he said. “Why is that?”, asks the CIO. “We need to get off that Version 11 Database. They are going to waive premium support and the security risk is no longer acceptable”. “Uh, ok… What does this really mean?", asks the CIO looking puzzled. The head of infrastructure starts to explain: “The migration will have quite a few ripple effects, and the new version requires a newer server operating system. That means some of the older servers need to be replaced. I suspect that a large number of applications will be affected, and migration from the older ERP legacy systems will be tricky. I cannot promise that we will make it without any production downtime.” With a worried expression, the CIO mutters, “I wish you would have told me that before the budget planning two months ago…” Source

Welcome to Industry 4.0, also known as the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This revolution includes a range of new technologies that fuse the physical and digital worlds. It impacts all disciplines, economies, and industries.

As many of you probably know, on May 12^th, an international cyberattack started infecting more than 230,000 computers in over 150 countries with the worst-hit countries being Russia, Ukraine, India and Taiwan and including many others worldwide. In Europe, some of the worst hit enterprises were Telefonica, FedEx, Deutsche Bahn, Latam Airlines and parts of Britain’s National Health Service.