Starting nearer home, the substation fire and power outage at Heathrow in March not only closed the second busiest airport in the world, preventing flights and diverting goods and passengers at an estimated $100s of millions to the worldwide airline industry (revenue, compensation and share value), it also hit UK tourism and the many businesses and homes that operate in and around Heathrow, as well as associated businesses.
Secondly, the Marks & Spencer cyber-attack by online criminal group, Scattered Spider, has left M&S with empty shelves and forced it to pause online shopping services. As a result of this attack, M&S has seen more than £700 million wiped off its stock market valuation, and that’s before loss of retail sales.
Meanwhile in Spain and Portugal , as factories, stores and hotels gradually returned to normal on Tuesday after a huge blackout the day before, business associations and companies in Spain, have projected that the outage will shave 1.6 billion Euros, or 0.1% off GDP.
Whilst M&S is the only directly cyber related incident of the three events, all of them cause immediate consequences to technology and scream the need for locked down security around data and any reliance on and resilience of comms tech (basically everything).
These events have also demonstrated that it doesn’t matter what type and size of business you are and however powerful you might be, you are still susceptible. If it can happen to the UK’s most famous retailer, as well as the second busiest airport in the world, and an entire country….then it can happen to anyone. It’s time for businesses to speak to an IT managed service provider like Equity to ensure they are prepared and protected.