Control Risks released their predictions for the top business risks for 2025, calling out Digital Concentration Risk as companies outsource their specialist IT services to external providers, such as cloud and security.
“The concentration of risk in centralised technological ecosystems in a worsening threat landscape will be a top risk for organisations in 2025.”
Global technology disruptions such as the July 2024 Crowdstrike outages shows how human error or system misconfigurations can create a correlated industry-wide impact to customer organisations. And as these companies pass control to external tech vendors, they may be losing the in-house skills needed to respond to future incidents and outages.
“The concentration of digital ecosystems has forced companies to relinquish control over their most critical assets. Few will have the ability to protect their own networks; fewer still will be able to manage their critical technology dependencies.”
Companies need to include third parties in their scenario planning; taking account of both accidental and malicious actors impacting both their own systems and those of their most critical technology suppliers.