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RIMS Risk Forum India 2021: Building Resilience As COVID, Cyberrisk Top Business Risks

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An increasingly key theme year over year, resilience is at the root of the latest Excellence in Risk Management India report from Marsh and RIMS—and the RIMS Risk Forum India 2021 virtual event, where the report was officially released today. In the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic, risk professionals in India reported acute short- and long-term concerns about the interconnected risks of COVID-19 cases, global economic recession, and surging cyberrisks amid shifts in work arrangements.

In addition to the death of more than 5 million people in India, the pandemic has taken a considerable economic toll on the region. “According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), India’s economy contracted by close to 8% in 2020, while the world’s economy contracted by 3.5%,” the report noted. “Despite the OECD’s projections for economic expansion—both in India and globally—in 2021 and 2022, the potential for a prolonged global recession remains a concern for organizations in India.

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Previously one of the top risks for India-based risk professionals before COVID-19, cyberrisk has also increased significantly with the pandemic and the shift to remote work. “The shift to a remote workforce necessitated by sweeping lockdowns to stem the spread of the pandemic is widely seen as having increased cyberrisk,” Marsh and RIMS noted. “The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) data indicated that cyberattacks in India rose by 300% in 2020, according to news reports. And cyber risk remained elevated in 2021, with more than 600,000 cybersecurity incidents reported in the first six months of the year alone, according to CERT.”

The continuing pandemic, resulting fallout, and ever-growing cyberrisk have presented the biggest risks for organizations in India in 2021, and the survey indicates that local risk professionals expect these to dominate the agenda for businesses in the year to come.

Despite the considerable concern, few respondents said their company is fully prepared for the continued fallout from COVID-19 or future pandemics. Asked to rate their organization’s preparedness from 1 to 5 (not prepared to fully prepared, respectively), the majority of India-based risk professionals ranked their organization a 3, and only 10% said they are fully prepared. While cyberrisk has been a top threat for longer, preparation is not much better for the threat—only a quarter of Indian companies said they are fully prepared for a cyberattack. This is particularly concerning as “some extent of remote work is expected to remain, leading to concerns of increased cyberattacks due to unsecured home networks,” Marsh said in a press release.

According to the report, this underscores the imperative to develop robust risk management strategies for both current and emerging risks and to focus on building resilience. Marsh identified four “common behaviors among companies that are on the path to becoming more resilient”: anticipating risk, connecting risk management to business strategy, avoiding gaps in the perception of preparedness, and measuring relevant data. Marsh and RIMS explained these further, defining key pillars that have set successful businesses apart, and potentially also offering considerations for other organizations to develop more mature risk management programs:

  • Anticipation: Resilient companies expect the unexpected. They have crisis management plans in place, but they also dig deeper, look farther ahead. Consider that during the pandemic even organizations with thorough business continuity plans struggled. Why? Many of them didn’t fully anticipate the widespread, long-lasting damage a pandemic could create.
  • Integration: Another key behavior among resilient organizations is to fully integrate risk management with operations and strategy. Doing so increases the ability to develop effective responses. Most organizations do not connect resilience planning with their long-term investment strategy. Those that do make the connection are on the path to better mitigating financial exposure, reputational damage, business interruption, and other losses.
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  • Preparedness: On the journey to resilience, it’s important to develop an accurate perception of an organization’s preparedness. A false sense of security can halt an organization in its tracks. Companies often overestimate how quickly and effectively they will be able to respond to and recover from a given risk.
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  • Measurement: There is no shortage of data and analytics in today’s business environment. But consistently applying metrics can be a stumbling block. Many companies fail to conduct a high rate of modeling and forecasting even on risks they see as important. And among the companies that do so, most only model in select areas.

Marsh and RIMS recommended that organizations in India focus on resilience heading into 2022 and beyond. “Resilience means being able to absorb the impact from a range of emerging risks and depends in large part on having robust risk management strategies in place,” the report explained. “This includes anticipating risk, connecting risk management to business strategy, ensuring your organization’s perception of preparedness doesn’t lead to a false sense of security, and measuring relevant data.”

Respondents largely indicated that their organization planned to increase investment in risk management, with 55% saying they expect increased resources, 27% expecting investment to stay the same, and only 4% expecting a decrease. This could be a critical differentiator in navigating COVID-19 recovery and other emerging risks in 2022. Indeed, 42% cited budget at the most critical barrier to understanding the impact of emerging risks on risk management.

Among the takeaways from the report, Marsh and RIMS urged organizations to invest in preparedness. “Look beyond pandemic as you develop a risk management strategy that is prepared to respond to any number of emerging risks,” the report said. “For example, shifting work patterns have intensified an already escalating cyber risk landscape that calls for a range of responses, from scenario planning to financial quantification.”

In addition to a panel on the Excellence in Risk Management India report, the RIMS Risk Forum India 2021 virtual event includes a number of sessions that address resilience challenges and opportunities for risk professionals in India. The program includes keynote addresses by Ajay Srinivasan, chief executive officer at Aditya Birla Capital Limited (ABCL), and Dr. Soumya Kanti Ghosh, group chief economic advisor at the State Bank of India, as well as education sessions like “Cyber Risk Management: A Priority for a Resilient Economy,” “Climate Risk and Your Path to Resilience,” “What COVID-19 Has Taught Us About ESG Risks and Why Risk Management Needs to Change,” and “Breaking the Chain: How Understanding Business Interruption Exposures Can Mean Supply Chain Resilience.”

The RIMS Risk Forum India 2021 virtual event continues tomorrow, December 4, and sessions will also be available for on-demand viewing for the next 60 days. Registration can be found here: https://www.rims.org/events/rf/india-forum-2021

On Data Privacy Day, Catch Up on These Critical Risk Management and Data Security Issues

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Happy Data Privacy Day! Whether it is cyberrisk, regulatory risk or reputation risk, data privacy is increasingly intertwined with some of the most critical challenges risk professionals face every day, and ensuring security and compliance of data assets is a make or break for businesses.

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In Cisco’s new 2021 Data Privacy Benchmark Report, 74% of the 4,400 security professionals surveyed saw a direct correlation between privacy investments and the ability to mitigate security losses. The current climate is also casting more of a spotlight on privacy work, with 60% of organizations reporting they were not prepared for the privacy and security requirements to manage risks with the shift to remote work and 93% turning to privacy teams to help navigate these pandemic-related challenges. Amid COVID-19 response, headline-making data breaches and worldwide regulatory activity, data privacy is also a critical competency area for risk professionals in executive leadership and board roles, with 90% of organizations now asking for reporting on privacy metrics to their C-suites and boards.

“Privacy has come of age—recognized as a fundamental human right and rising to a mission-critical priority for executive management,” according to Harvey Jang, vice president and chief privacy officer at Cisco. “And with the accelerated move to work from anywhere, privacy has taken on greater importance in driving digitization, corporate resiliency, agility, and innovation.”

In honor of Data Privacy Day, check out some of Risk Management’s recent coverage of data privacy and data security:

CPRA and the Evolution of Data Compliance Risks

Also known as Proposition 24, the new California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA) aims to enhance consumer privacy protections by clarifying and building on the expectations and obligations of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).

Frameworks for Data Privacy Compliance

As new privacy regulations are introduced, organizations that conduct business and have employees in different states and countries are subject to an increasing number of privacy laws, making the task of maintaining compliance more complex. While these laws require organizations to administer reasonable security implementations, they do not outline what specific actions should be taken. Proven security frameworks like Center for Internet Security (CIS) Top 20, HITRUST CSF, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Framework can provide guidance.

Protecting Privacy by Minimizing Data

New obligations under data privacy regulation in the United States and Europe require organizations not only to rein in data collection practices, but also to reduce the data already held. Furthering this imperative, over-retention of records or other information can lead to increased fines in the case of a data breach.

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As a result, organizations are moving away from the practice of collecting all the data they can toward a model of “if you can’t protect it, don’t collect it.”

3 Tips for Protecting Remote Employees’ Data

As COVID-19 continues to force many employees to work from home, companies must take precautions to protect sensitive data from new cyberattack vulnerabilities. That means establishing organization-wide data-security policies that take remote workers into account and inform them of the risks and how to avoid them. These three tips can help keep your organization’s data safe during the work-from-home era.

What to Do After the EU-US Privacy Shield Ruling

It was previously thought that the EU-US Privacy Shield aligned with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), but following the CJEU’s recent ruling, the Privacy Shield no longer provides a mechanism for legitimizing cross-border data flows to the United States. This has far-reaching consequences for all organizations that currently rely on it. In light of the new ruling, risk professionals must help their organizations to reevaluate data strategies and manage heightened regulatory risk going forward.

The Risks of School Surveillance Technology

Schools confront many challenges related to students’ safety, from illnesses, bullying and self-harm to mass shootings. To address these concerns, they are increasingly turning to a variety of technological options to track students and their activities. But while these tools may offer innovative ways to protect students, their inherent risks may outweigh the potential benefits. Tools like social media monitoring and facial recognition are creating new liabilities for schools.

2020 Cyberrisk Landscape

As regulations like CCPA and GDPR establish individuals’ rights to transparency and choice in the collection and use of their personal data, one can expect to see more people exercise these rights.

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In turn, businesses need to ensure they have formal and efficient processes in place to comply with such requests in the clear terms and prompt manner these regulations require, or risk fines and reputation fallout. These processes will also need to provide sufficient documentation to attest to compliance, so if businesses have not yet already, they should be building auditable and iterative procedures for “data revocation.”

Data Privacy Governance in the Age of GDPR

As personal information has become a monetizable asset, risk, compliance and data experts have increasingly been forced to address the regulatory and operational ramifications of the rapid, mass availability of personal customer and employee data circulated both inside and outside of organizations. With new data protection regulations, Canadian and U.S. companies must reassess how they process and safeguard personal information.

Key Features of India’s New Data Protection Law

Among the new data protection laws on the horizon is India’s Personal Data Protection Bill. While the legislation has not yet been approved and is likely to undergo changes before it is enacted, its fundamental structure and broad compliance obligations are expected to remain the same. Companies both inside and outside India should familiarize themselves with its requirements and begin preparing for how it will impact their data processing activities.

After COVID, Cyberrisks Top Agenda for Risk Professionals in India, Marsh and RIMS Report

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For risk professionals in India, the COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the critical need to build business resilience and develop mature yet flexible business continuity plans to address both short- and long-term threats. In the new Marsh and RIMS report Excellence in Risk Management India 2020, Spotlight on Resilience: Risk Management During COVID-19, 63% of risk professionals in India said a new pandemic or continued fallout from COVID-19 was a top risk facing their organization, followed by cyberattacks (56%), data fraud or theft (36%), failure of critical infrastructure (33%), fiscal crises (31%), and extreme weather events (25%).

This mix of top risks illustrates the critical task before risk professionals heading into 2021: ensuring capability and procedures to respond to fast-emerging disasters, while not losing sight of the critical work to boost baseline resilience against foreseeable risks across the enterprise.

“Organizations need to balance their focus between longstanding and emerging risks,” said Sanjay Kedia, country head and CEO of Marsh India. “While there has long been an awareness of weather-related risks, low-frequency risks generally receive less attention. The pandemic has underlined the need for risk managers to keep all perils on their radar.”

Indeed, Marsh and RIMS found risk assessment and modeling are critical gaps for India-based risk professionals to focus on to mature their risk management programs. “As businesses recover from COVID-19, many senior leaders are shifting attention to questions of resilience.

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But, as our survey shows, the use of advanced risk management techniques in India remains limited—for example, more than one-fifth of respondents do not assess or model emerging risks,” the report noted.

This is particularly the case with emerging cyberrisks. Cyberattacks and data loss or theft ranked among the top three threats, and the pandemic escalated the already rising number of cyberthreats to companies in India with the shift to remote work, online business, and ransomware attacks. Indeed, the report noted that the pandemic led to a surge in cyberattacks against Indian companies, with New Delhi among the top 10 most often attacked cities with regard to ransomware in 2020, and more than a third of Indian respondents to a June survey by Microsoft reporting they had fallen prey to a pandemic-related phishing email. Yet only a third of respondents to the Marsh/RIMS report said they model potential cyber loss scenarios, and only 26% plan to do so in the next year. Key cyberrisk management measures and the rate of implementation among Indian companies include:

Whether it is phishing attacks on employees or internet outages interrupting operations in the supply chain, the report notes that the next major event for Indian companies could well be a cyberattack. Focusing on building cyber resilience was one of the report’s four key recommendations, noting “organizations should shift their focus from solely trying to prevent an attack to accepting the inevitability of a cyber event and taking action to mitigate its effect.”

The report’s other top recommendations for risk professionals in India were:

  • Regularly review existing business continuity plans – “Companies should carefully review and refine their business continuity plans. They should ensure their plans enable them to respond effectively to threats that bring short-term pain and long-term and widespread challenges, as is the case with COVID-19.”
  • Embrace the changing working environment – “Lockdowns intended to stem the spread of COVID-19 required many companies to quickly move to remote working, change their business models, and implement new safety measures upon return to the workplace. Other perils, like a natural disaster, could necessitate and precipitate such shifts, even if shorter in duration. Businesses should invest in structures that allow employees to work remotely effectively, efficiently, and safely and should educate employees on new ways of working under changing circumstances.”
  • Remap and remodel your supply chain – “The COVID-19 pandemic emphasizes the need to re-examine supply chains regularly, with special focus on understanding the resilience and reliance of vendors. Companies would benefit from understanding their vendors’ ecosystems; both to provide a clearer view of how they could be affected by different risks and to review contracts to better understand liabilities.
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Moving forward, there is considerable room for risk professionals to be more involved in scenario analysis and strategy

In December, RIMS introduced additional resources specifically for risk professionals in India looking to elevate their risk practice. The report was released around the recent RIMS Virtual Risk Forum India 2020, which brought together hundreds of risk and insurance professionals from across India and around the world. Soon thereafter, the risk management society also announced the official formation of a RIMS India Chapter.

“The exchange of knowledge and experience drives the risk management profession, allowing practitioners to more effectively enhance corporate decision-making, strengthen resiliency and leverage new and exciting opportunities for their organizations,” said Roop Kumar, chief of risk at SBI Life and inaugural president of the India chapter’s board of directors. “RIMS India Chapter will quickly become an exceptional resource for all business leaders. We look forward to delivering cutting-edge risk management insight to support our members as they advance their programs and their careers.”

Other members of the inaugural board of the India chapter include: Keerthana Mainkar, head ERM at Infosys; Amol Padhye, head of market risk at HDFC Bank; Amber Gupta, head legal and corporate secretary at Birla Sunlife Insurance; Anand Shirur, CEO of Digitangle Consulting PVT, Ltd; Steward Doss, associate professor at National Insurance Academy; Monika Mittal, professor at BIMTECH; Shibyanshu Sharma, vice president of risk management at SBI Life; and Yogesh Ghorpade, head of ERM and insurance lead at Thermax Industries.

“RIMS India’s Board of Directors truly represent a cross-section of the country’s risk management community,” said Gopal Krishnan K S, head of RIMS India Operations. “The Society looks forward to learning from their unique experiences and welcoming others to contribute so that, together, we can develop the highest standard of risk management education to address corporate India’s biggest concerns.

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Assessing the Legal Risks in AI—And Opportunities for Risk Managers

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Last year, Amazon made headlines for a developing a human resources hiring tool fueled by machine learning and artificial intelligence. Unfortunately, the tool came to light not as another groundbreaking innovation from the company, but for the notable gender bias the tool had learned from the data input and amplified in the candidates it highlighted for hiring.

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As Reuters reported, the models detected patterns from resumes of candidates from the previous decade and the resulting hiring decisions, but these decisions reflect that the tech industry is disproportionately male. The program, in turn, learned to favor male candidates.

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As AI technology draws increasing attention and its applications proliferate, businesses that create or use such technology face a wide range of complex risks, from clear-cut reputation risk to rapidly evolving regulatory risk. At last week’s RIMS NeXtGen Forum 2019, litigators Todd J. Burke and Scarlett Trazo of Gowling WLG pointed toward such ethical implications and complex evolving regulatory requirements as highlighting the key opportunities for risk management to get involved at every point in the AI field.

For example, Burke and Trazo noted that employees who will be interacting with AI will need to be trained to understand its application and outcomes. In cases where AI is being deployed improperly, failure to train the employees involved to ensure best practices are being followed in good faith could present legal exposure for the company. Risk managers with technical savvy and a long-view lens will be critical in spotting such liabilities for their employers, and potentially even helping to shape the responsible use of emerging technology.

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To help risk managers assess the risks of AI in application or help guide the process of developing and deploying AI in their enterprises, Burke and Trazo offered the following “Checklist for AI Risk”:

  • Understanding: You should understand what your organization is trying to achieve by implementing AI solutions.
  • Data Integrity and Ownership: Organizations should place an emphasis on the quality of data being used to train AI and determine the ownership of any improvements created by AI.
  • Monitoring Outcomes: You should monitor the outcomes of AI and implement control measures to avoid unintended outcomes.
  • Transparency: Algorithmic decision-making should shift from the “black box” to the “glass box.”
  • Bias and Discrimination: You should be proactive in ensuring the neutrality of outcomes to avoid bias and discrimination.
  • Ethical Review and Regulatory Compliance: You should ensure that your use of AI is in line with current and anticipated ethical and regulatory frameworks.
  • Safety and Security: You should ensure that AI is not only safe to use but also secure against cyberattacks. You should develop a contingency plan should AI malfunction or other mishaps occur.
  • Impact on the Workforce: You should determine how the implementation of AI will impact your workforce.

For more information about artificial intelligence, check out these articles from Risk Management: