Digital Resilience

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PORTRAIT AND LANDSCAPE

Achieving Resilience in Our Fragile Digital Environment

In the Great Recession of 2007–2008, we all learned a new concept. It was called “too big to fail,” and it described certain business entities—especially financial institutions—that have become so large, so interconnected, and so complex that their failure would be catastrophic to the global economic system. For this reason, governments must deem them “too big to fail” and therefore support them at any cost.

That was a debatable idea in 2007–2008. Today, it is an impossible idea, because today virtually any business can become too big to fail. Recall that the spectacularly costly cyber breach of Target (Chapter 1), a giant corporation with millions of customers, ...