This month, supermarkets across Europe and the UK have again been hit by cyberattacks targeting their fridges and freezers. The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre described the impact at a national level as minimal. But as its chief executive, Richard Horne, rightly pointed out, for any business that has been hit, “it is an enormous issue”.
Many of you are just coming back online from today’s Microsoft incident, which wasn’t a cyber-attack in itself, but did reinforce the need to think through our overdependence on single systems, especially when we are driving even greater integration in the name of efficiency! For me, it is clear that cybersecurity presents a real and growing risk to business-wide resilience.
In an operating environment that poses several threats to organisations in all sectors, we cannot afford to get this wrong. The approaches business leaders take to deliver resilience will directly shape the trust their business can expect from customers.
Taking ownership of the issue and confronting immediate challenges is critical. Failure to do so risks a repeat of last week’s attacks – next time, potentially on a scale that could cripple key sectors of the UK economy.
Business resilience is only as strong as the weakest link in the supply chain
Cyber risk is multifaceted. It can strike at multiple points across an organisation’s value chain, so any effort to prevent or limit disruption requires a bird’s-eye view from the boardroom (of what is an increasingly complex picture) when assessing risk.
If we don’t understand our supply chains sufficiently, we won’t be able to spot or address specific vulnerabilities, leaving us exposed. And whether an attack starts in our own systems or a supplier’s, in the eyes of our customers – and the media – the responsibility sits with us.
Microsoft outage over the past 24 hours also highlights the need to be able to react effectively to critical IT outages – whatever the underlying cause. Such disruptions look set to become more frequent and widespread. How well your business could run on pen and paper is an extreme question, but it helps you think harder about backup processes and system redundancy that many organisations should be considering more.
That is why resilience must be built into a seamless, joined-up customer journey, led by the boardroom and delivered by colleagues on the front line.
Front up when things go wrong
While strong risk management should be a given, the changing nature of these and the speed of that change.
Our customers deserve honest and transparent communication. That matters most of all when disruption hits the service they rely on.
For service leaders in particular, that means fronting up and taking responsibility. Ultimately, trust is built long before disruption hits – in our relationships with suppliers and staff, behind the scenes and on the front line. And it provides some insulation against cyber disruption, but failure to prepare properly for the new normal will not be tolerated by customers for long, and hard-won trust can quickly splinter.
That is why people remain critical to your business resilience and customer relationships.
How we invest in building that resilience, both financially and in the relationships behind the scenes, will determine whether we keep our customers’ trust for the long term, and how we drive the relentless need for curiosity, challenge and the law of unintended consequences.
So as many businesses head into Black Friday and the festive season – one of the busiest periods in the service calendar – I would urge decision-makers to stress-test their systems and processes as well as their supply chain: what contingencies are in place if things go wrong, and what does that look like in practice from the customer’s perspective? And above all, what will we communicate, how and by when? It’s not a question of ‘if’ anymore, but more a question of ‘when’.
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