The Business Continuity Institute has published its fourth annual Horizon Scan report. This year’s report has been published in association with BSI.
The BCI Horizon Scan assessed the business preparedness of 760 organizations worldwide and shows that the top three threats that business continuity managers are concerned about are:
- Cyber-attack (82 percent are concerned about this threat);
- Unplanned IT outages (81 percent);
- Data breaches similar to that suffered by Sony in 2014 (75 percent).
Supply chain disruption is seen as the fastest rising threat, climbing to fifth place in this year’s report, up from 16th in 2014. Almost half of those polled (49 percent) identified increasing supply chain complexity as a trend, leaving their organization vulnerable to disruption from conflict or natural disasters.
Despite growing fears over the resilience of their firms, the report records a shock fall in the use of trend analysis by business continuity practitioners, with a fifth of firms (21 percent) failing to invest in this protective discipline. A similar proportion (22 percent) report not employing trend analysis at all, making it a blind spot for organizations. Globally business preparedness shows variations with 8 out of 10 (82 percent) organizations in the Netherlands utilising trend analysis, while just 6 in 10 firms in the Middle East and Africa do so (63 percent).
Adoption of ISO 22301, the business continuity standard, appears to have reached a tipping point with more than half (53 percent) of organizations now relying upon this, up from 43 percent last year. Almost three quarters of firms (71 percent) intend to better align their activities with ISO 22301 over the next 24 months.
You can read the full Horizon Scan report after registration here.
