ASG's Security Solutions Blog

The Cost of Not Being Resilient

  

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This is the tenth article in a series entitled: Data Management and Organizational Resilience. ASG is offering a series of blogs as well as a white paper that aggregates these blogs into one download, with the intent to make the case for data management and its correlation to the Organizational Resilience Management function.

The financial impact of events cannot be overstated.  Worldwide, the cost of natural disasters and terrorism exceed the gross domestic product of many countries.  When you consider the financial and global supply chain impacts of the recent tsunami in Japan, or the costs of terrorism since 2011, the financial impact of the conflict in Libya, or the cost of the recent riots in England you immediately get a sense of the real costs of not being resilient.

A recent situation which has presented itself in my own community is the recent identification of defects in an abutment to the Howard Hanson Dam.  The Howard Hansen Dam provides flood control for the Green River Valley in Washington State. This posed a unique threat to our state economy and to the second largest goods and services distribution center on the West Coast, including job sites of more than 112,000 workers and homes of more than 25,000 residents.  The valley is home to about 170,000 residents and numerous industrial facilities some of which are the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport and sprawling corporate complexes and distribution centers belonging to companies such as Boeing, Microsoft, Starbucks, and REI.  The Dams Sector Exercise Series DSES10 focused on the Green River Valley and all the complexities of the critical interdependencies in that location.  As you can imagine the regional impacts were huge with national economic implications.

With this in mind it makes it easier to understand that we measure impact on the enterprise by identifying potential measures of loss.  For purposes of this paper a low loss is something that is budgeted for and has no impact on the enterprise, a medium loss requires a reallocation of assets to survive the loss, and a high loss is one that requires outside assistance to survive.

The challenge is creating a common operating picture which leads to a common planning picture or unity of effort and purpose. 

Download the entire white paper.

Our next article will focus on how to make the Data Intelligent.