The shut-down of Heathrow Airport last week is a reminder to companies that they need to expect the unexpected and prepare accordingly.
The issues at Heathrow were the latest in a string of unforeseen challenges that impacted businesses in recent months, which also include the impact of Storm Éowyn and last year's CrowdStrike outage.
"What we saw last Friday at Heathrow is what we commonly refer to as a 'Black Swan' event - these events have a low probability of occuring, but when they do, the impact can be really serious as we obviously saw," said Colette Devey, Partner in EY Ireland's Risk Consulting practice.
She said that there has been a rise in events that cause disruption to companies - because of challenges like climate change and the growing reliance on large and complex systems and technologies.
"The events [like Heathrow] are rare - what is definitely becoming less rare are cyber attacks, IT outages - such as CrowdStrike - which can paralyse an organisation's ability to do business," she stated.
In the face of that, Ms Devey said, companies need to focus on building resilience into their entire organisation. But she many have discovered that just thinking about business continuity is probably too narrow of an approach.
"What's really important is trying to think about what is core and critical to your organisation," she said. "What you're doing is, when you're building a resliency programme around that, you're really prioritising what needs to be responded to and recovered, in what order - so you can get back up and running."
That does not necessarily require large-scale investment, either. At the heart of it, she said, is having a plan of action in place.
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This begins with anticipating the potential risks and threats that face a business, and identifying what can go wrong and the impact that could have. After this, firms should have a framework in place for how they would respond to any crisis that does hit.
"That covers things like crisis management, communications, then continuity, disaster recover," Ms Devey said.
It is also vitally important that everyone in an organisation understands what their roles are, and that they know how to deliver on those.
After that, it is important that firms are prepared to learn from their experiences.
"When things go wrong, what can we do differently going forward?," she said.
Though she is keen to stress that this is not all about identifying what went wrong and where the gaps in a company's plan may be. It can also be about highlight the aspects of the plan that went well, and how that can be built on in the future.
"An important message coming out of Heathrow is that things did go right - they did get the business back up and running in 16 hours - so what are the strengths that can be drawn on?" Ms Devey said.
