Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from Crisis Solutions
It’s been another strange year - good riddance to it, I say. But developments with Omicron over the last few weeks mean that there is just as much uncertainty around as this time last year.
Still, as business continuity and crisis management professionals our role is to reflect on what has happened, learn lessons and then plan ahead. And with that in mind my colleague Stuart Beattie has put some thoughts together.
What has 2021 been like?
We’ve seen the return to a more normal pattern of annual crisis exercising and training with our clients following 2020 where this was replaced by management of the Covid-19 challenges. In 2021 the majority of our events have been conducted virtually on Teams, Webex or Zoom. This raises additional challenges but is likely to be more realistic going forward given the likely future level of home working. Before the latest government guidelines moved us back to home working we were starting to do face to face events. Cyber continues to make up over 50% of our crisis exercises but we have seen an increase in our clients’ appetites towards scenarios that go to the heart of an organisations reputation. Examples of this have included ’Slave Labour’ and ‘ESG - Environmental, Social and Governance’ scenarios.
What do we expect in 2022?
Based on what we’ve seen in 2021 and conversations with our clients we think the following areas will become increasingly important:
1. IT Team Crisis Capability
Many of our events now have an IT exercise before the traditional Gold and Silver teams are invoked. This tests the technical response, speed of action and approval processes for what are likely to be significant IT decisions. Importantly, it also means that senior management teams get to understand the steps taken by IT to contain an incident in the early stages.
2. Operational Resilience
We have already run a number of Operational Resilience exercises for financial services clients in the UK given the regulatory requirements. This is likely to continue to develop and will be a focus area going forward.
Best wishes for 2022.