Hello Leaders,

We hope your week is off to a great start. Gartner just released its Q42024 Top Emerging Risk Trends Report. Here is our analysis of the five trends from that report that you should urgently focus on.

Take at least one idea from here and put it work. Share your results with us. If you are willing, we can feature you in our newsletter.

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1. Third-party risk from your IT vendors

The recent Crowdstrike event was a wakeup call for the businesses worldwide because of the widespread impact. They faced anywhere from hours to days of outage. It put significant pressure on their IT staff to mitigate the impact and restore the services.

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Actions you need to take to reduce risks from your IT vendors:

1. Review your IT stack to identify all possible failure scenarios. In case of Crowdstrike, it was update to the signature file. It bypassed the N-1/N-2 policies that organizations had defined.
2. Review your testing strategy and Change Management procedure for auto updates.
3. Assess the impact if any of your the components fail or become unavailable.
4. Create recovery plan to protect against those failures / outages.
5. Diversify with multi-vendor solutions.

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2. Weaponization of AI

AI is making it easier for novice threat actors to launch sophisticated attacks. AI is being used to find vulnerable targets, deepfake phishing emails, poison data, etc. It is making it difficult for your employees to differentiate fake from real.

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Actions you can take to guard against sophisticated cyberattacks:

1. Basic security hygiene password strength, patching, and hardening is still neglected and is non-negotiable.
2. Implement multi-factor authentication (MFA) to create an extra layer of security. Government and healthcare are lagging behind all industries in implementing MFA. https://scoop.market.us/multi-factor-authentication-statistics/.
3. Explore User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) solution which attempts to find anomalous behavior of users and devices e.g. routers, servers, and databases.
4. Explore AI-powered honeypots. This research agency processed over 1.7 million attack attempts using AI honeypot. https://palisaderesearch.org/blog/llm-honeypot.

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3. Employee Misuse of AI

According to this Salesforce survey, 55% employees are using unapproved generative AI tools at work. There is a significant risk of employees inputting data which can violate privacy guardrails, result in loss of intellectual property, infringe on copyright laws, etc.
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Actions you can take to promote safe and response use of AI:

1. Define clear responsible use policies. Responsible Artificial Intelligence Institute provides an easy to use template to get started - https://www.responsible.ai/ai-policy-template/. For a more comprehensive approach refer to the NIST AI Risk Management Framework Playbook https://airc.nist.gov/AI_RMF_Knowledge_Base/Playbook.
2. Train employees on safe and responsible usage.
3. Clear define how the organization intends to use AI and how it aligns with its mission. Communicate transparently and regularly to win employees’ trust.

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4. Internet Fragmentation

Trade barriers, geo-political tensions, regulations, surveillance, etc. are creating fragmentation around national borders. This is increasing the cost of doing business across countries or threatening disruption of service. The recent TikTok band is a prime example of this. It is not only affecting TikTok, but all the business that rely on TikTok to acquire customers.

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​Actions you can take to prepare your business for Internet fragmentation:

1. Assess the interconnectedness and dependencies of your global IT systems. Identify potential sources of disruption due to local government actions.
2. Investigate decentralized architecture to reduce the dependencies and contain the impact.
3. Review Business Continuity plans and incorporate such scenarios in your exercise.
4. Extend the assessment to include organization structure and people dependencies.
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5. Decline in Employee Productivity

This might come as a surprise when there is so much hype around improvement in employee productivity due to AI. The 2024 Mercer Global Talent Trend Report revealed that 82% of workforce are at the risk of burnout. Excessive meetings, looping, and collaboration during the pandemic is now contributing to 192% increase in weekly meetings. This means that people are not able to complete their work during the work hours.

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​Actions you can take to maintain or improve employees' productivity:

1. Instead of weekly status meetings with large number of participants, do frequent short meetings with small number of participants.
2. Clearly define agenda and expected outcome. Ensure everyone attending is needed for the agenda.
3. Ensure everyone is coming prepared to the call.
4. Designate meeting a day or two half days as meeting free.
5. Messaging apps like Teams, Slack, etc. can also contribute to stress with too many channels and groups.
6. Highly matrixed organized where people are spread across many initiatives also causes context switching wastes and disproportionate meeting vs. work time. Reassign responsibilities or restructure team to align employees to fewer initiatives.

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If you would like to schedule time to discuss any of these, reach out to us via consult@agileclevel.com.