Covid blinkers leave Australian firms exposed to other risks

A narrow focus on covid has created an attention blindspot at Australian organisations and a failure to invest properly in resilience against risks such as climate change, cybersecurity and supply chains, a survey by platform Dataminr has found.

A plethora of other risks that threaten businesses are not being properly addressed amid a laid-back attitude and “false sense of confidence,” says New York-based Dataminr, which counts Twitter, Shell and the United Nations as customers.

Dataminr Senior VP Helen Sutton says it is concerning that the mindset adopted to tackle covid has not been expanded to other areas.

“The issue isn’t that businesses aren’t prioritising risk management. The real danger is that investments from the past two years have mostly been in resilience strategies that are specific to covid,” Ms Sutton said.

“This is concerning given that the importance of identifying and reacting to business risks in as close to real time as possible has grown exponentially and the types of risks organisations are faced with are increasingly complex.”

According to the survey, covid remains the main concern for businesses in Australia (67%), followed by staffing (45%), supply chain (40%), cybercrime (25%), and climate change and unknown risks (each 20%).

Only 19% of those polled strongly agreed their organisation had the capability to comprehensively discover risk indicators that may impact their business, even though a quarter had invested over $100,000 between 2019-2021.

“Investment in business resiliency remains relatively low among Australian businesses,” Dataminr said.

“A third are still not confident about their ability to identify risks and events in real time … and have zero investment in risk resilience.”

The amount Australian businesses have invested in business resilience remains comparatively low overall, the survey of more than 300 Australian security decision makers found, which was contrary to global perceptions and “suggests a laissez-faire attitude,” it said.

“This indicates a significant disconnect between what businesses have invested in (or not) and the level of confidence each has compared to the reality of the market. This gap puts Australian businesses at risk of returning to pre-pandemic levels of unpreparedness.”

Dataminr recommends scenario planning, recognising that unknown risks may have the biggest impact, embracing risk as an opportunity to embed flexibility and preparedness, empowering staff with the right technology and real time information, and to be proactive.

Currently, investment in risk management procedures among Australian businesses is not sufficient and should be focused on dedicated personnel and technology.

“Australian organisations should continue to invest in people, processes and technologies that allow them to remain proactive and prepared to handle any risk or crisis,” it said.

“The only way to stay ahead and prepared is to constantly be scenario planning across functions, and invest in an agile workforce that is equipped to detect and mitigate a diversity of potential threats. Don’t wait to challenge your existing workflows, toolset and incident management strategies.”