The business
This example considers a business that provides real-time video-on-demand to consumers. The business relies entirely on the internet and has a £76 million turnover. The market is highly competitive. Business activity is constant but has predictable peaks in demand during evenings and week-ends.
Today’s hit
At 3.05pm Servers 6 and 3 fail (it’s not known currently but a power unit failed). The available of Server 8 is compromised by a vulnerability.
What’s the business impact?
This is the key question and the answer will guide the response. The average annualised cost is reported at £4,100,000 [Ponemon2015c]. The Management Team need a clear picture to maintain operations but also to report back to investors. The business depends on cyber but how and why is incredibly difficult to determine. It depends on the day, the time of day and what the business is doing.
If it’s a weekly batch stock ordering then there’s no impact over the next few hours. But it’s not, it’s the front end order processing facility. Is there a dual standby or pool? Can they cope with the anticipated load?
But what if you could know how much value your business would lose and why, before it happened? How much is that intelligence worth?
Actionable Intelligence cuts through this and can be as simple as one graphic. Illustration 2 provides an example graphic of the predicted future cash impact on the business over the next 8 hours. Here the graph predicts the spot-time percentage loss to the business. The analytics also raise an alarm, via email, with the appropriate stakeholder.
Despite the complexity of the underlying analysis, this easy-to-understand graphic instantly identifies an issue as the potential loss. The prediction shows clearly that the business is going to take a hit and the reason why. This allows rapid intervention to save the business and prevent the loss.
As it stands, if the business does nothing the losses will stand at £75k over the next 12 hours.
Due to the complexity and interaction of the systems within the business the predicted impact has range band. The graphic shows the worst case, best case and most likely impact on the business. In this case the impact on the business is disastrous. Within two hours the business will lose approximately 20% of its value, with a minimum of 50%.
The key now is in understanding what will cause this devastating impact. This is the predictive intelligence. This is the bit that adds value. PG provides a tabular output detailing which failed systems are causing the most impact.
Why is this strategic intelligence important?
1. Knowing that the business is at risk is key – with this intelligence action can take place.
2. Cyber support activities are now triaged, with the most important thing to the business fixed first.
3. Intelligence on which asset(s) are causing the most impact allows strategic decisions to be made.
The value
What is the value of Predictive Actionable Intelligence? Early identification of the business impact by the analytics allowed remediation to take place.
The business avoided a £600k outage. Client activity continued avoiding dissatisfaction and customer churn of 5% (or £1.52M).
Bibliography
Ponemon2015c: Ponemon Institute, 2015 Cost of Cyber Crime Study: United Kingdom, 2015
Ponemon2015a: Ponemon Institute, 2015 Cost of Data Breach Study: Global Analysis, 2015
Ponemon2015b: Ponemon Institute, 2015 Cost of Data Breach Study 2015, 2015
NTT2015a: NTT Group, 2015 Global Threat Intelligence Report, 2015
Verizon2015a: Verizon, 2015 Data Breach Investigations Report, 2015
Ponemon2015d: Ponemon Institute, 2015 Cost of Cyber Crime Study: Global, 2015
SunTzua: Sun-tzu, The Art of War, , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_War