How cyber resilience supports the resilient organization

Change is happening faster than ever and it can disrupt companies – even big, long-established brands – in the blink of an eye. The ability…

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OpenText

July 9, 20205 minutes read

Change is happening faster than ever and it can disrupt companies – even big, long-established brands – in the blink of an eye. The ability to respond to, and act upon, this continuous wave of change will mark you out as either the disruptor or the disrupted. And who wants to be the latter?

In the last 15 years, just over half of the Fortune 500 companies have disappeared. And by 2027, it is estimated that three-quarters of today’s S&P 500 will be replaced. The current COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted two areas where resilience and the ability to rapidly respond to change and disruption is absolutely crucial to survival:  supply chain flexibility and cyber resilience.

Flexible supply chains

Organizations have designed their supply chains to limit inventory and to create hyper-efficient connections between them and their suppliers. The efficiencies have been valued over agility for so long that the connections have grown rigid. During the pandemic, the lack of inventory in the channel, and the rigid connections created with suppliers, became a disadvantage as companies struggled to secure supply from regions in the world that were hardest hit by the pandemic. A new challenge has formed as a result of these global events. Companies must create a more agile supply chain that will also be secure.

Modern, just-in-time (JIT) inventory approaches provide organizations with a clear strategic advantage, one gained by not carrying any inventory on your profit and loss statement. But, as has been brought into sharp focus by the current COVID-19 pandemic, an unforeseen or unprecedented event can severely disrupt JIT operations. When nobody has any inventory, we find ourselves longing for the days of a supplier with giant warehouses full of stuff!

But supply chain resilience isn’t just about responding to the disruption caused by a once-in-a-generation pandemic. This type of agility is essential for everyday disruptions in supply and distribution that result from all kinds of change, including labor, weather, capacity, and economic.

There are two important elements to this resilience – visibility and speed. Organizations must be able to see what’s going on – and not just with primary suppliers, but also with those companies further down the supply chain. Second, and perhaps more importantly, is the ability to act and respond – quickly, sometimes instantly. This requires a transparent marketplace and one around which you have enough information about possible partners, their capabilities, their current status, and inventory levels to respond rapidly.

Agility Logistics is a great example of the importance of visibility across the supply chain. The leading logistics company moves goods that underpin global commerce, including freight and shipping via land, air, and sea for more than 60,000 customers in 100 countries. With integrated information management supported by OpenText™, Agility has enhanced its customers’ visibility into their accounts, shipping status and key documents, streamlined operations, and reduced carbon emissions throughout the supply chain. For example, by combining data points from origin to destination – and any planes, trucks, or ships in between – Agility Logistics can calculate exactly how much CO2 is emitted for a client’s shipment and use that data to inform future route selection.

“When an organization is able to track everything from beginning to the end, then they have much better control over how they can contribute back to improving sustainability, to reducing carbon emissions,” said Deepak Sharma, Global IT Director, Business Solutions & Support at Agility Logistics.

For Agility Logistics, digital transformation is not just about injecting technology into a well-established industry; it is changing the way of doing business, enhancing customer experience, and improving efficiency and sustainability. That’s supply chain resilience in action.

Cyber resilience

The volume and sophistication of cyber threats continue to grow, as do the costs associated with being attacked. The impact of downtime, reputational damage, and regulatory fines can pose a significant threat to the very existence of a business. A report by the Online Trust Alliance put the total cost of cyberattacks in 2018 at $45 billion, while an Accenture study found the average cost of an attack for an organization increased from $1.4 million to $13 million over the last year.

In a world of cloud-native applications, employees working from anywhere and billions of connected devices and end-points, the alarming rise in cyber-attacks and ransomware poses a particular risk for all organizations And a key reason why the next generation of security will need to combine content management with traditional security methods of endpoint protection.

It’s not just about stopping attacks getting through, however. Organizations must also be able to remediate and protect information if and when an endpoint is compromised. That means making sure any information that is accessed by a bad actor is rendered useless to them.

An example of cyber resilience in practice is the ransomware attack on the town of Colonie, in Albany County, NY. The county’s three OpenText Carbonite® Server appliances stored at offsite locations had not been affected, and the IT team was able to restore the data and reconfigure each application server for the town. Having Carbonite Server helped them avoid a much bigger disaster than what could have occurred, allowing them to continue to pay their employees and, most importantly, support the critical public safety systems.

Building the resilient organization

Resilient organizations must be able to adapt quickly to accelerating change. Across organizations, this requires technologies and processes that scale quickly and reliably, empower and secure a remote workforce, and provide supply chain flexibility.

Find out how OpenText can help your organization become resilient with our on-demand content from OpenText Enterprise World Digital.

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OpenText

OpenText, The Information Company, enables organizations to gain insight through market-leading information management solutions, powered by OpenText Cloud Editions.

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