When a common company in the supply chain of a given industry is impacted by a cyber incident or cyber breach, such as was widely reported relating to the CTS breach in recent weeks, customers can experience significant disruption to services. When services are initially knocked offline and customers attempt to quickly switch back to paper-based systems to offer service continuity, further problems can arise, with delays in the completion of services not uncommon. This has the potential to cause reputational damage to those firms who are unable to adapt quickly or do not have business continuity plans to allow service backups to be deployed.
When a high-profile incident occurs and, in particular, when such incidents impact a large segment of a specific market or sector, initial disruption should swiftly be followed by incident review and process updates, both by those directly affected and those more fortunate to be watching from the sidelines. In this way, a disruptive incident can act as a catalyst to firms to conduct reviews of their service provision. This is critical to maintain business continuity, and to ensure that they have developed and tested…
