The BCI has published its annual Horizon Scan Report, which looks at the current threatscape and looks ahead to 2025 and beyond. The report is sponsored by Noggin.
Based on a survey of business continuity and resilience professionals, the report identifies IT and telecom outage as the single biggest cause of disruption to organizations in the past 12 months. Almost a quarter (23.6%) identified this area as the most disruptive type of standalone incident. It was followed by:
- Critical infrastructure failure: 15.1%
- Extreme weather events: 8.5%
- Cyber attack: 8.5%
- Supply chain disruption: 4.7%
When it comes to the consequences of disruptions for organizations the top five impacts reported by survey respondents are:
- Loss of productivity: 69.5%
- Customer complaints received: 39.1%
- Negative impact on staff morale/wellbeing/ mental health: 39.1%
- Reputation damage: 38.1%
- Loss of revenue: 36.2%
Interestingly, when looking ahead to 2025 there is little correlation between the most disruptive incidents in 2024 and the perceived top risks facing organizations. While, as noted above, IT and telecom outage was reported as the single biggest cause of disruption to organizations in the past 12 months, it was seen as only the fourth top risk for 2025. Conversely, while only 8.5% of respondents said that a cyber attack was their most disruptive incident, cyber attacks are seen as the top risk in the coming year.
One reason for this apparent discrepancy is the frequency of incidents. When frequency is considered, the ‘top five most frequent & impactful events over the last 12 months’ are identified as:
- Fraud or attempted fraud
- Cyber attack
- IT and telecom outage.
