Why BCM/BCRM and Cybersecurity Must Converge

Welcome. My name is Martin Ko. I'm principal Analyst at Koko. Today. I will talk about why concepts such as BCM or B cm and cybersecurity must converge in the way they are working together. And maybe even from an organizational perspective. So what are we talking about? We are talking about BCM, which is business continuity management or B CRM, which is business continuity and resilience management. So business continuity management focuses on how can you continu your business in the case of a crisis of a major issue, a major incident, the BCR M aspect, that's the resilience.

So getting also resilient against such incidents against crisis, so that continuity becomes easier to do. This is a discipline, which is more focused on organizational measures and all the things you need to do from a business perspective. On the other hand, we have cybersecurity. And when we look at what is happening today, today's businesses are increasingly transforming into digital businesses, digital businesses run, so to speak in the cyber space and they are vulnerable to cyber attacks. Apparently.

So cyber attacks become a major risk for the continuity, for the resilience of businesses for the digital business. This is one of the major threats. There are threats as well, such as pandemics, academics, natural disasters, and so on, but cyber attacks are a huge. And when I talk with CSOs these days more and more these CSOs say my main job today is to keep the business up and running, to keep a business alive, even because if we are hit by a major incident and our main it, our core, it stops for two or three days. We might even go bankrupt bank.

For instance, can't survive that long without their core it systems running without being able to trade, to fulfill obligations, et cetera. So we need to consider that in a digital business, cyber resilience is a central element of business resilience, and we can also look at it from our perspective. If you look at the ability to work from home, again, being able to do it is part of business continuity.

So the relationship of what we do in the cyber area, specifically cybersecurity, and what we do on the business side is very tied and there's a strong need for tight alignment between These areas. So from my perspective, even the technical aspects within business continuity, which are not only cyber resilience or cyber attack resilience, which also include other things such as the bag up, the ability to work from home and all the other things they should better converge because at the end, it is the question about how can we ensure that our digital business should continue to run.

So my strong recommendation is revisit your BCM or BCM strategies. Most businesses have some sort of crisis planning and maybe a BC strategy strategy extend your BCM to B cm, become resilient. That is one important thing and revisit your organizational structure and potentially expanding what CSO can do towards really covering everything which helps your business becoming more resilient.

And which helps you better, better being able to continue in critical situations, because as I've said in a digital business and one effect of the current pandemic crisis is that we will see a strong uptake in the true transformation. One consequences. We will be more vulnerable on the cyber end of things. And so these things must be better combined availability of systems back network availability, cybersecurity, cetera. That must go hand in hand. And so we must better integrate these initiatives, specifically the it elements of these initiatives. That's my recommendation.

That's my strong belief. Thank you for listening to me.