Detica urges businesses to get resilient to danger

Detica predicted businesses will face increasing security threats during 2008 and has urged organisations to push resilience to the top of the agenda.

With a marked rise in organisations disrupted by hard-to-predict events, both man-made and natural, Detica is calling for businesses to act now to put better defences in place before it is too late.

Fred Chedham, head of Detica’s business resilience services, said: ‘Businesses need to change their approach to security because the threat landscape has changed considerably in recent years and companies haven’t adapted to take this into account. For example, the UK economy loses around £14 billion a year because of financial crime and we’re not talking about careless business or bank robberies. The data explosion and the Internet have enabled criminals to steal identities and commit serious crime with increasing sophistication. Globalisation and the explosion in social and corporate networking also mean businesses are far more vulnerable to seemingly remote disruptive events.’

“The data explosion and the Internet have enabled criminals to steal identities and commit serious crime with increasing sophistication.

Fred Chedham, head of Detica’s business resilience services

Faced with this complexity, Detica argues that businesses need to move beyond ‘security’ to ‘resilience’: This means tearing down the walls between physical and virtual security and integrating risk management consistently across the organisation.

Furthermore, said Detica, businesses also need to take a ‘network view’ of risk: identifying the cause of events in their ever-widening networks and understanding the complex fault lines that underlie their operational environments. The Northern Rock crisis was a prime example of unidentified risk which had a far-reaching impact upon a wide variety of organisations and individuals.

Chedham concluded: ‘Our experience from large-scale resilience change programmes tells us that businesses can never be completely safe from danger, but they can make sure that they’re as resilient to threats as possible. Only by pushing resilience to the top of the agenda and engaging senior management will businesses be able to confront and absorb the security shockwaves of 2008 and beyond.’