The issue of cyber, physical and supply chain resilience has been moving inexorably up the boardroom table ever since the Middle East crisis. Heightened C-suite level involvement has highlighted the fact that resilience has occupied a corporate no-man’s land previously, with no-one wanting to take ultimate responsibility and confusion being felt across various departments over ownership of and responsibility for the accuracy of personnel data. But with both cyber and physical attacks becoming more frequent, investors are asking questions and senior teams are scrambling to answer.
Strategic risk
CEOs and executive teams are asking the same questions around workforce accountability and safety that CSOs and HSE leaders have been asking for years. The knock-on effect is that the framing is also shifting – this area is no longer being presented as a security problem. It is being positioned as a duty of care issue and a strategic risk that impacts operational continuity. The kind of language that gets C-suite attention.
Newly exposed failings
The findings of Restrata’s white paper on lessons learned from the Middle East crisis have revealed failings, not new, but newly exposed. Fundamentally what the Middle East conflict exposed was the fact that despite world-changing technological advances, the basic structural problem with information and people-visibility had never been fixed. This is simply not good enough, not for the safety of personnel on the ground or the continuity of trade, especially when the frequency of conflict has gone from three years to three months. Gone are the days when only in high-risk locations should employees be geo-located. In today’s febrile atmosphere conflict can happen anywhere and therefore organisations need to be prepared everywhere.
Extra burden on CSOs
With external and internal threats proliferating across organisations, CSOs are asking how to handle an increasing number of threats while they also have a growing organisation with more assets and more demands. Fortunately, the number one characteristic of security and resilience teams in general is agility and a willingness to adapt. The way these teams succeed is fundamentally dependent on the people and the tools they have.
Finding the answers
In a crisis situation that requires intervention for people-safety, so much information needs to have been provided to be processed and analysed, to create the best outcome. And that drawing together of data has to happen incredibly quickly; the recent events in the Middle East have highlighted that environments previously considered safe, such as Dubai, can be exposed to risk overnight and teams must be ready to react at a moment’s notice.
Questions need to be asked around employees or their family members who may have medical needs that could be affected in the event of a blockade or mobility issues which would need to be taken into consideration in the event of an evacuation, for example. On a travel safety front, are employees and their families safer being moved to a more neutral location or will that move in itself make them a target? Which employees are travelling to and from the area at that time?
AI – the CSO’s secret weapon
Bringing AI into resilience software adds sensitivity to the platform and performs the vital task of collecting together disparate data streams from different parts of the organisation in various formats to present a clear picture.
Human-first AI assists the operator, rather than replacing it, and uses your data aligned to your rules to minimise hallucination. As an example, an AI alert assistant can autogenerate and disseminate an emergency mass-notification of an unfolding incident, in the relevant language of the recipient, via their preferred channel (email, WhatsApp, Teams, SMS etc). When you combine that with an open ecosystem which is bringing in threat feeds from multiple providers, along with the rules engine that determines which of those threats you are going to respond to and who it impacts, CSOs can respond accurately, decisively and swiftly to any external threat.
Data detail
The key to this is data. The information used as the foundation of the system must be robust and accurate and by having confidence in that accuracy, understanding exactly where the key data is held and exactly which information the AI is using to inform its decisions, security leaders can have confidence in AI’s interpretive abilities. From there, tasks that previously required manual effort across multiple systems can now be handled via an intuitive UI and agentic support, freeing teams to focus on strategy and the decision-making that will keep their people safe.
Some groundwork is inevitably required to ensure this data accuracy. The information required to account for an organisation’s employees is often siloed, out of date or in the wrong format. Security teams have long had to accept that pulling together people-data is a long and arduous task, with confusion often over whose task it is.
Staying on track
For any organisation keen to implement AI systems, anchoring it in strong data sets with robust and comprehensive guard rails is vital to avoid decision-making based on bogus assumptions.
A simple mapping exercise to establish the maturity of an organisation’s security and resilience technology and data environment is a great starting point for any would-be implementer of an open security system with AI as the conduit. By understanding its maturity, an organisation can begin to introduce AI in a way that complements its operational systems. This type of assessment lays the foundation for future success.
Life critical
The world of resilience and security ensures people safety and operational continuity through supply chain robustness. As security as an issue moves steadily up the boardroom table, companies are demanding resilience software with the flexibility to adjust as their requirements and the world changes. AI integration is opening budgetary opportunities in the boardroom and security is finally being recognised as a tool for retention and a benefit rather than a cost. In tandem with open, provider-agnostic technology, organisations now have a real chance of gaining total control over how they build and scale resilience to keep everyone safe, everywhere. Operational resilience now has a value, not simply a cost.
By Botan Osman, CEO of Restrata.
- AI in Supply Chain