The Banking Executive Magazine - August 2024 Issue

Towards a Universal Ecosystem THE NEED FOR SYSTEMIC AND DIGITAL RESILIENCE The world economic forum issued the cyber resilience alarm heard around the world. The July global cyber outage caused an estimated $1 billion in global costs and was a sig- nal sent globally to invest in cyber re- silience. There is a major lesson to be learned from the outage. We need to prepare for such incidents in ways that we can maintain the resilience of busi- nesses and services. Whether caused by the intentional actions of an ad- versary or the innocent mistakes of well-intentioned actors, businesses and governments need to be resilient to cyberattacks and other cyber fail- ures that can lead to major disrup- tions of business processes. The incident highlights the need to shift our perception of cybersecurity from a mere IT issue to the broader concept of cyber resilience as an in- tegral part of business resilience. In the face of a cyberattack, businesses should be able to recover fast from an incident and resume business as usual. To be cyber resilient, organizations need to first and foremost identify business-critical processes and en- sure the continuity of those even dur- ing cyber incidents. This has to involve continuous conversations with business leadership to ensure alignment with the overall business strategy while conducting real-time prioritization. We need also to think beyond cyber and business resilience and look at the big picture encompassing sys- temic resilience. As cyber threats be- come more advanced, businesses increasingly rely on a few sophisti- cated security software providers. This reliance creates a single point of failure, where a flaw in one system can lead to global cascading effects. Balancing centralized, highly pro- tected architectures with decentral- ized, lower-impact systems is a difficult challenge. Cybersecurity leaders from across the world should develop a common un- derstanding of business cyber re- silience and collect and systemize experience on cyber resilience trade- crafts that matter. As online and cyber infrastructures become ever more complex, interconnected and central to all sectors of business and society, the importance of cyber re- silience will only continue to rise. Senior White House tech and cyber- security official highlighted the risks of consolidation and advised that we need to really think about digital re- silience not just in the systems we run but in the globally connected se- curity systems. The chaotic scenario that played out the IT outage did not involve a malicious actor but a lack of digital resilience. BLAMING THE MONOPOLY POWER OF BIG TECH Numerous Fortune 500 companies use CrowdStrike’s cybersecurity soft- ware to detect and block hacking threats. Computers running Microsoft the BANKING EXECUTIVE 10 ISSUE 188 AUGUST 2024