Operational vulnerability

  • Release version: Washingtondc
  • Updated January 30, 2025
  • 3 minutes to read
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    Summary of Operational Vulnerability

    The Operational vulnerability capability within Operational Resilience allows users to identify and address operational vulnerabilities and critical functionality gaps. This includes engaging with stakeholders, analyzing root causes, and developing remedies for issues such as software defects, exposed customer data, and third-party challenges. Reports can be submitted through the Employee Center or Operational Resilience Workspace.

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    Key Features

    • Empowers business users to report discrepancies, breaches, or complaints.
    • Supports creation of reports from various sources, including assessments and scenario analyses.
    • Tracks impacted organizational areas like entities, locations, and users.
    • Facilitates team collaboration for investigations and response decisions.
    • Initiates remediation efforts and conducts root cause analysis to eliminate vulnerabilities.

    Key Outcomes

    Operational vulnerabilities are categorized into:

    • Technical vulnerabilities: Gaps in IT infrastructure, security protocols, and internal controls.
    • Operational vulnerabilities: Process-related or external factors impacting operations, often undetectable by scanning tools.

    The resolution process involves identifying gaps, assessing their impact, making decisions on addressing vulnerabilities, assigning tasks, and verifying resolution. In some cases, vulnerabilities may be accepted and closed without action.

    Use cases illustrate scenarios such as dependency on third parties or localized risks that require manual intervention, emphasizing the need for proactive measures like diversifying third-party relationships or relocating facilities. Organizations should conduct cost-benefit analyses to evaluate solutions.

    The Operational vulnerability capability in Operational Resilience empowers users to flag operational vulnerabilities or critical functionality gaps, engage with key stakeholders, analyze underlying causes, and identify remedies.

    Using Operational vulnerability, teams can address issues stemming from violations, software gaps, or breaches. Users can submit reports on operational vulnerabilities through the Employee Center or directly create a report in the Operational Resilience Workspace.

    Some typical operational vulnerabilities include the following situations:
    • Exposed customer data
    • Third party issues
    • Software defects
    • Political or environmental situations

    Benefits of Operational vulnerability

    The Operational vulnerability capability offers the following advantages to your organization:
    • Empowers business users to report any discrepancies, breaches, or complaints that need team attention.
    • Enables creation from multiple sources like importance and impact tolerance assessments, scenario analyses, self-attestations, and services.
    • Records impacted and related organizational areas requiring attention, such as entities, locations, users, and companies.
    • Facilitates collaboration among teams to investigate, assess, gather evidence, record observations, and decide on responses for further review.
    • Enables initiation of remediation and preventive measures and conducts root cause analysis to eliminate the source of the vulnerability.

    Defining technical and operational vulnerabilities

    In an organization, operational vulnerabilities can be categorized into main groups:
    1. Technical vulnerabilities: These are substantial gaps, flaws, or weaknesses within an organization's IT infrastructure. This category includes deficiencies in security protocols, system designs, internal controls, or daily operational practices.
    2. Operational vulnerabilities: These pertain to non-IT, process-related, or external factors that could impact an organization's operations. Typically, these involve issues with third parties, facilities, or external situations that evade detection by scanning tools.

    Workflows for Operational vulnerability

    Resolving an Operational vulnerability involves several key steps:

    1. Identification: Recognize the operational gap.
    2. Assessment: Evaluate if the vulnerability needs to be addressed. This assessment, which can be done once or repeatedly, involves weighing the repair costs against the potential savings from fixing the issue.
    3. Decision-making: Based on the assessment, determine the course of action. If the decision is to address the vulnerability, complete the following tasks:
      • Task assignment: Assign specific tasks to the relevant individuals.
      • Completion and verification: Once tasks are completed, verify that the vulnerability has been resolved.
    4. Alternative path as acceptance: After assessment, the vulnerability may be accepted as is. In this case, no further action is taken, and the vulnerability is acknowledged and closed.

    Use cases for Operational vulnerability

    The situations outlined in the following examples demonstrate operational vulnerabilities. These issues cannot be detected by IT scanners but can be identified by subject matter experts. They represent weaknesses or gaps in daily operations, such as working with a particular third party or depending on a single facility.

    Scenarios Description
    Working with a third party or relying on a single facility

    Consider a company outsourcing its critical processes to third parties from a particular geography. Due to current affairs, the third-parties are prevented from providing the services and the company is prevented from receiving services from this geography.

    With a commitment to deliver the services to the customers, the company must identify an alternate third-party swiftly to continue operations.

    The key takeaway for the company is to address the risk of third-party concentration.
    Non-IT related vulnerability that requires manual intervention

    Consider a vital financial institution situated in a distant location. If a nearby situation puts the area at risk, the management team might identify this as a vulnerability.

    This serves as another example of a non-IT related vulnerability that necessitates manual intervention.

    To tackle these operational vulnerabilities, an organization could investigate various approaches such as diversifying third parties across multiple regions or moving financial facilities. To implement these solutions, an organization would usually perform a cost-benefit analysis, weighing factors like the cost of mitigating the operational vulnerability and whether the solution is a one-time fix, temporary measure, or permanent solution.