The systemic nature of critical infrastructure protection using a medium sized company as the case study
Jeffery Sewell · Australasian Journal of Paramedicine · 2007
Critical infrastructure can be defined as privately and publicly run organisations such as energy systems, water systems, transportation, telecommunications, emergency services, banking and finance. The critical infrastructure (CI) on which society relies is now dependent on the interconnected communication networks the information age has spawned. With the evolution of the information age, not only has the communications landscape changed dramatically, the security landscape has changed too. With information technology being so ubiquitous, it has created new underlying concerns about the systems now reliant on them. The reliance and complexity of these interconnected systems has increased vulnerabilities confronting critical infrastructure. This means old risk based assessment models cannot fully satisfy the needs of the contemporary world. This research intends to understand the impact to Western Australia's critical infrastructure in the event of an information system failure in a company that is part of Western Australia's critical infrastructure supply chain. The results of this research were a failure in the information system in the company investigated (The Coventry Group) would not have a catastrophic effect on Western Australia's CI supply. This conclusion is due to the redundancy the Coventry Group has built in their standard operating procedures through the use of manual procedures, which aims to minimize the disruption an information system failure causes to their customer service levels.