Analysis

Vigilance and resilience complement prevention

Future of risk series: Trend four

Risk prevention methods can never be foolproof, and increasing investment in preventative approaches often yields only marginal benefit along with unwelcome side effects such as slowing innovation. Organizations are expanding their approaches to focus on vigilance (detecting patterns that may indicate or even predict risk events) and resilience (the capacity to rapidly contain and reduce the impact of risk events) as well. We can expect activities like these to rise in importance: monitoring emerging threats, identifying anomalies in business processes, managing stoppages from third-party vendors, and preparing for risk-related workplace disruptions.

What forces are driving this trend?

Growing recognition of inability to eliminate risks altogether
Rapid advancements in data analytics, machine learning, and AI capabilities
Greater sharing of information among organizations as a result of the networked economy
Rising threat of nation states investing significant resources into disruptive activities
Rise in macro risks such as climate change, natural disasters, political unrest, and more

Back to top

What are the opportunities?

  • Assess and prioritize risks to determine where to invest in vigilance and resilience
  • Identify and test cutting-edge, commercially available tools focused on vigilance and resilience

Back to top

What are potential threats and pitfalls?

  • Inability to detect significant threats due to lack of data, tools, or expertise
  • Ineffective resilience efforts due to complex interdependent operating structures or lack of agility

Back to top

Case studies: Where is this trend already in play?

Cytora aims to provide real-time structured data on supply chain, operational, and geographic disruptions across multiple categories of risk, including factory fires and explosions, labor strikes, terrorism incidents, industrial accidents, and natural disasters for supply chain risk and corporate risk management. Alerts received within five minutes of an event breaking online seek to give organizations the opportunity to try to mitigate risks early and keep costs low.1

Verafin focuses on providing solutions in the fraud detection and anti-money laundering space based on AI-enabled algorithms and a more holistic view of banking transactions with diverse data points. Its latest product strives to enable cross-institutional analysis to detect suspicious activity across multiple institutions.2

Zeean, an open source project, taps the crowd to map the flow of materials across the world. Using this database, Zeean then attempts to help organizations analyze the economic impact of isolated events (for example, climatic catastrophes) on global supply chains through powerful visualizations, working to help organizations and governments achieve supply chain resilience in a cost-effective manner.3

Back to top

Explore the future of risk trends:

   

Back to top

1 Cytora, “Cytora data products,” http://www.cytora.com/products.html.

Verafin, “Verafin – Home,” http://verafin.com/?nabt=1.

3 “Zeean, “Zeean – Home,” https://zeean.net/.

Back to top

Future of Risk stickynav. Do not delete! This box/component contains JavaScript that is needed on this page. This message will not be visible when page is activated.

Did you find this useful?