Cybersecurity and Digital Resilience
The Global Centre for Risk and Innovation (GCRI)
Digital systems sit underneath almost every other system, and they depend in turn on electricity, telecommunications, hardware supply chains and skilled people. This page maps the main dependencies, explains how digital failures travel into physical, economic and social harm, and names the platforms across the Consortium that study, govern or finance the connected systems.
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For dependencies and consequences, in GCRI's spatial-intelligence reading, the map opens on night lights, population density and true-colour imagery with true colour from NASA GIBS, framed on Europe; every other NASA layer, live feed and forecast waits in the layer list.Satellite and model products as NASA publishes them, each with its own date; indicators, not assessments of any place; claim ceiling INTEGRATED.
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GeographyFor dependencies and consequences, in GCRI's spatial-intelligence reading, the map opens on night lights, population density and true-colour imagery with true colour from NASA GIBS, framed on Europe; every other NASA layer, live feed and forecast waits in the layer list.
Dependencies and consequences in Cybersecurity and Digital Resilience describe how cyber and digital resilience as well as critical infrastructure connect to other systems through physical, economic, social and ecological links, and how stress travels along them toward fields such as those of Disaster and Crisis Governance and AI and Digital Governance. Every dependency map states its assumptions, data and uncertainty; it describes connections, not a forecast.
Fig.How GCRI, GRF and GRA share one field while the authorities decide. Design, not a record.
The working screen behind this subject: its structure, terms and states. Names are placeholders and values illustrative.
Data centres, networks and devices need continuous power. Grid failures take digital services down, and backup power has limits. See Critical Infrastructure.
Fibre, submarine cables, mobile networks and satellite links carry data. Damage at a few landing points or exchanges can isolate regions.
Semiconductors, firmware and open-source libraries come from concentrated supply chains that are hard to verify.
Physical systems depend on digital control. Water treatment, power distribution, pipelines, rail signalling and building systems use industrial control systems; compromise or failure can stop operations or, in the worst cases, create safety hazards. Healthcare depends on electronic records, imaging, laboratory systems and connected devices. Logistics depends on scheduling and tracking systems, so a digital outage at a port or carrier quickly becomes a physical backlog.
Economic and social systems depend on digital identity, payments and communications. Outages in payment systems interrupt commerce and benefits; data breaches expose people to fraud; disruption of information systems can weaken public trust. Financial transmission of these effects is studied at Financial Cyber and Operational Resilience and Payments and Market Infrastructure at The Global Risks Alliance (GRA).
A failure at a cloud or identity provider stops many customers at once, across sectors that have no direct relationship with each other.
Loss of clinical systems forces diversion of patients, delays diagnosis and spreads load to neighbouring hospitals.
Malicious code inserted into a trusted software update reaches every customer that installs it, bypassing perimeter defences.
A power outage disables monitoring and communications just when they are needed to manage the outage; this is the theme of the platform's cyber-physical outage exercise.
Each term as this page uses it. Where a standard-setting body defines the term, the wording follows that body.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Interdependency | A two-way dependency between infrastructures, such as power needing telecoms for control while telecoms need power to run. |
| Cascading risk | Risk that a failure in one system or component triggers failures in others that depend on it. |
| Compound event | Two or more hazards or drivers occurring together or in sequence whose joint impact exceeds what either would cause alone, such as drought followed by intense rain; IPCC assessments use the term. |
| Dependency mapping | Tracing the people, processes, technology, facilities and suppliers a service relies on. |
Dependency analysis uses network science and contagion and reliability and resilience engineering, with stated assumptions and uncertainty. Decisions on regulation and crisis coordination belong to competent authorities; dialogue among them is convened at Disaster and Crisis Governance and AI and Digital Governance at The Global Risks Forum (GRF).
The current service level is R0: information and enquiries. An enquiry receives a reference and names the next step; applications, payments, compute allocations and registrations open only when their team, terms and review capacity exist.