Managing Risks in Digital Transformation by Ashish Kumar & Shashank Kumar & Abbas Kudrati

Author:Ashish Kumar & Shashank Kumar & Abbas Kudrati
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Packt
Published: 2023-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

The cost of damage to equipment, assets, and IT systems

The English word sabotage means a deliberate action aimed at weakening a polity, effort, or organization through subversion, obstruction, disruption, or destruction. A popular but unverified story explains the origins of the word thus – sabot is a French word that means “wooden shoes.” In 16th century Belgium, some textile workers who were disgruntled with their employer are said to have thrown their wooden shoes in the textile machinery wheels. The stuck shoes would damage the equipment and bring production to a standstill. Another famous reference is to the Luddites in 19th century England, who were a secret organization of workers that damaged textile mills to protest the increasing mechanization of the mills, which threatened the employment prospects of the existing workers.

Historical footnotes aside, an employee who perceives injustice at the workplace or has any nefarious agenda is likely to try and damage the assets of the workplace surreptitiously. With the rapid digitization of the enterprise landscape, the modern-day sabot is likely to be digitally thrown while the physical premises remain vulnerable as well.

A large educational institution parted ways with an IT employee because the employee did not agree to relocate to the suggested location of work. The employee believed that he had made his location preferences clear at the time of the appointment itself and suspected that he was singled out because of a racial discrimination claim he had filed against his superiors a while ago. He was given a severance package, but the employee carried a grudge against the perceived or real injustice of the whole scenario. As a way of revenge, he changed the password of his institution’s cloud service provider account before leaving. The moment he left, thousands of users of this institution lost access to their emails and other services. The whole institution’s daily work came to a standstill for days and when they tried contacting this now ex-employee, he feigned innocence. Apparently, the ex-employee then sought hundreds of thousands of dollars to restore access for his ex-employer.

The damage to a company’s access and IT systems can be costly. The method to put a numerical dollar against this cost varies based on the actual scenario. In the preceding example, the loss of productive time for users can be costed by deciding upon a financial value that a productive user generates or is compensated for over that period. Any additional expense incurred to correct the system either in man-hours or extra money spent on solutions is added to this cost.

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