Continuing a series on how response to the Covid-19 lockdown and further pandemic response will change (or not) the private security industry, just as private security services respond to the rest of society’s own pandemic changes.
Everything is a risk, even crossing the road. It’s taught to children as good sense to look both ways before you cross the road; but no-one looks up as a matter of course before crossing the road, in case of something falling from the sky. The pandemic may bring a new facing up to what ought to be on a risk register and how business continuity should respond to high impact-low likelihood risks, such as an IT outage.
The consultancy Control Risks Group (CRG) argues that we are, for the time being, stuck with the same risks we’ve always had, but more so.
CRG points to how “companies with global footprints will themselves have to become leaders in navigating a minefield of conflicting political priorities, regulatory regimes and pandemic de-escalation.”
Activism and civil unrest have a new driver: the pandemic. And cyber criminals know we’re vulnerable – a spike in ransomware operations globally is adding to an already complex crisis management cycle for many businesses. It won’t stop there, the consultancy warns in an update to its otherwise end of year ‘Risk Map’.
Nick Allan, Control Risks CEO has written that ‘for us as for many of our clients, the challenge is to innovate and adapt at a time when instinct pushes most companies to be intensely conservative’.
He said that risk management lessons need to be embedded into organisations. “The next few months look to be no easier than the first half of the year. Indeed, our ‘Top 5 Risks’ article points out that the risk landscape has not changed. Rather the pandemic has served to pour fuel on the fires that were already burning. Despite the exuberance of stock markets, the world has yet to feel the economic impact of the pandemic and while unprecedented injections of liquidity will ease the pain for some countries, the well understood connection between economic decline and political risk is still to play out. Even before the pandemic 2020 was set to usher in a period of political turbulence.
“The danger for many businesses is that the focus on managing the impact of the pandemic will leave teams unable to respond to new challenges. Some of this will be due to fatigue but some will be because the structures and ways of working are too new to be incorporated into planning. While the immediate term is difficult to anticipate, the clear tensions between the US and China, increased cyber extortion and information security theft, and the lack of a globally coherent response to the pandemic all point to risks that business must plan around.
“Businesses are reviewing their supply chains and other dependencies as they seek to build greater resilience. Concluded; “They do this against a backdrop of increasing geopolitical tension, economic recession and globalisation in retreat. Finding a path to stable growth will not be easy. The need for agility remains as critical as ever.”
More of the Control Risks ‘Risk Map special edition’ at https://www.controlrisks.com/riskmap-2020-special-edition.
