In July 2024, a routine software update brought global systems to a halt.
A bug in a product update from CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity software firm, triggered a massive IT outage. Airlines experienced delays. Hospitals were disrupted. Financial services froze. Simply because one patch didn’t work as planned.
The incident wasn’t a targeted cyberattack. It wasn’t even malicious. And yet, the fallout was enormous.
It served as a sobering reminder: you don’t need to be hacked to face a full-scale operational crisis. Sometimes, a single failure in your systems is enough.
The cybersecurity catch-22
Technology is evolving faster than ever and so are the risks.
Most people think about cybersecurity in terms of hackers and breaches. But many of the most disruptive events organizations face aren’t attacks at all—they’re accidents, outages, or natural disasters.
A power failure during a storm. A buggy software update (like CrowdStrike’s). A cloud provider outage that takes down your internal systems. These aren’t the result of a bad actor, but they can still shut your organization down just as quickly.
So, what do you do to prepare?
There are countless cybersecurity tools, tests, and services out there but none of those efforts will be as effective if you don’t first understand what’s actually at risk inside your organization.
Without that clarity, you’re spending money without a strategy by trying to fix everything and protect everything, all at once.
The costs you can see
We’ve all seen the headlines. Cyber incidents are expensive.
According to IBM, the average cost of a data breach reached $4.4 million in 2023. That figure includes incident response, legal fees, and regulatory fines. These are the costs boards and budgets tend to track. They’re visible. Quantifiable.
But they only scratch the surface.
The costs you don’t see
The real damage often lies in the operational impact.
When systems go down, the disruption doesn’t just affect your IT team—it ripples across the entire organization. A shared tool goes offline, and suddenly 12 departments are stalled. Communications break down. Customer service lags. Daily operations grind to a halt.
You might not measure these costs in dollars, but you’ll feel them when customers are left waiting, staff are left scrambling, and your reputation takes a hit that money can’t easily fix.
These “hidden” costs—like delayed services, lost productivity, and long-term damage to public trust—can undermine your organization even if no data is ever breached.
Where to start
Before you start running scans or buying new tools, you need a clear picture of what matters most in your organization.
The Operational Impact Assessment (OIA), developed by the National Cybersecurity Center, helps organizations of all sizes—from small businesses and school districts to government entities and critical infrastructure industries—identify the systems they can’t afford to lose.
It’s a foundational step designed to help you map out what’s essential to your organization’s success. Think of it as the GPS for your cybersecurity journey.
The OIA helps you:
- Identify your mission-critical assets
- Understand how departments and tools depend on each other
- Uncover single-points-of-failure
- Visualize how a disruption would affect operations with dependency maps and tabletop exercises
When you start with an OIA, you make smarter investments going forward. By narrowing in on your most vital systems, you’ll be able to direct future resources, like a Pentest, exactly where they’re needed without wasting budget on low-priority assets.
Don’t wait and find out the hard way
Cybersecurity isn’t just about preventing attacks. It’s about understanding what’s at stake if (and when) they happen. The OIA gives you that clarity before something goes wrong.
If you’re not sure where to begin with improving your organization’s cyber posture, this is the place to start.
