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Personnel Shortages

Another threat source that can result in disaster is found in issues related to personnel shortages. Though most of the discussions of threats until this point have been related to threats to the operational viability of information systems, another significant source of disruption can come from having staff unavailable. While some systems can persist with limited administrative oversight, most organizations will have some critical processes that are people-dependent.

Pandemics and Disease

As the world knows all too well in the face of COVID-19, the most significant threat likely to cause major personnel shortages, while not causing other significant physical issues, is found in the possibility of major biological problems. Beyond COVID-19, other biological issues such as pandemic flu or highly communicable infectious disease outbreaks could also cause tremendous personnel impacts. Epidemics and pandemics of infectious disease have caused major devastation throughout history. A pandemic occurs when an infection spreads through an extremely large geographical area, while an epidemic is more localized. Prior to COVID-19, there had been relatively few major epidemics or pandemics since the advent of ubiquitous information systems.

Strikes

Beyond personnel availability issues related to possible pandemics, strikes are another significant source of personnel shortages. Strikes by workers can prove extremely disruptive to business operations. One positive about strikes is that they usually are carried out in such a manner that the organization can plan for the occurrence. Most strikes are announced and planned in advance, which provides the organization with some lead-time, albeit not enough to assuage all financial impact related to the strike.

Personnel Availability

Another personnel-related issue that, while perhaps not as extreme as a strike, can still prove highly disruptive is the sudden separation from employment of a critical member of the workforce. Whether the employee was fired, suffered a major illness, died, or hit the lottery, the resulting lack of availability can cause disruption if the organization was underprepared for this critical member’s departure.

Communications Failure

Dependence upon communications without sufficient backup plans represents a common vulnerability that has grown with the increasing dependence on call centers, IP telephony, general Internet access, and providing services via the Internet. With this heightened dependence, any failure in communication equipment or connectivity can quickly become disastrous for an organization. There are many threats to an organization’s communications infrastructure, but one of the most common disaster-causing events that occur with regularity is telecommunication lines being inadvertently cut by someone digging where they are not supposed to. Physical line breaks can cause significant outages.

Learn by Example

Internet2 Outage

One of the eye-opening impacts of Hurricane Katrina was a rather significant outage of Internet2, which provides high-speed connectivity for education and research networks. Qwest, which provides the infrastructure for Internet2, suffered an outage in one of the major long-haul links that ran from Atlanta to Houston. Reportedly, the outage was due to lack of availability of fuel in the area [15]. In addition to this outage, which impacted more than just those areas directly affected by the hurricane, there were substantial outages throughout Mississippi, which at its peak had more than a third of its public address space rendered unreachable [15].