Fires, freight, and phishing. Your potential exposure to risk is often closer than imagined. The inability to adequately deal with a disaster when it happens could result in a domino effect that heralds the closure of your business. To avoid such a drastic outcome taking place develop a disaster recovery plan. Once finalized, this plan should be stress tested to determine whether it will indeed hold water should the organization start to flounder.
To clearly understand the potential impact of an untested disaster recovery plan, let us take a look at one of the major suppliers in the aviation industry. The cMUSE software developed by Collins Aerospace automates the check-in process for passengers flying from a number of European airports. In September 2025 when this high risk supplier was faced with a phishing incident that resulted in a ransomware attack, its software was rendered inaccessible. At that point, many European airlines did not have a back-up plan in place to deal with the sudden loss of access to the cMUSE system. Airports like Heathrow, Brussels, and Berlin were forced to revert to the archaic manual check-in method. This resulted in major flight delays and cancellations across the Europe.
Meanwhile airlines such as British Airways and those in Paris that did not rely on the cMUSE system, continued to operate on schedule. The fact that the impact of the failure was only felt by Collins Aerospace clients highlights the perils of single-supplier contracts across an industry.
While approaching suppliers as partners that your organization works closely with has multiple benefits, it is important to prepare for instances where that supplier can fail. If the airports had adequately run stress tests on their supply chain, they might have identified the need for a fallback ticketing provider. Instead some airports and airlines were rendered paralyzed while requiring nearly 2 weeks to fully restore luggage and human check-in systems. The financial impact of the event included the cost of cancelled, delayed, and re-routed flights; a drop in share prices; the cost of additional labor for manual check-ins; and passenger claims for cancelled flights.
The question I have for you is, which supplier do you rely on whose compromise could negatively affect your business? What have you done to mitigate that risk? To help you effectively plan for your conversations about how your business can effectively prepare for and navigate these kind of challenges, I urge you to peruse through Chapter 6 of “Managing IT Suppliers : A Practical Guide To Vendor Management (https://exclusivebooks.co.za/products/9781041104155).
0 Comments